Just wanted to throw this quickie in before my next Ditch Day post (coming tonight or tomorrow), because I don’t feel like this information is anywhere out there and someone else might have the same problem that I did.

When I moved up to San Francisco, I signed up for AT&T U-Verse. The service itself is great so far, with the exception of AT&T’s DNS servers, which are pretty terrible. I have a Motorola NVG510 modem, which for some bizarre reason doesn’t let you change the DNS settings in the router, so I bought a Netgear N150 Router (WPN824N) to act as the actual router for my network. I used the instructions on this website to change the default DNS on my home network to Google’s Public DNS Servers, which highly improved my performance in loading webpages.

However, I soon discovered one problem: port forwarding no longer seemed to work, even when I set it up on the Netgear router. This was somewhat disappointing, because I had just bought a domain name at least partially so that I could forward a subdomain to my desktop at home. I believe this stems from the fact that instead of having a true bridge mode on the NVG510, they put an “IP Passthrough” feature, and I’m still not entirely sure what the latter does exactly.

The solution is actually rather straightforward, though. Instead of only setting up the port forwarding on the Netgear Router, I had to also forward those ports on the Modem. When it asks which device to forward them to, I forwarded them to the Netgear Router (which should just show up in the devices drop-down if it’s already connected).

I hope this winds up being helpful to someone at some point in the future!