About port forwarding (also called "port mapping")
To connect to your iGet Mobile server, you need to know the IP address (or hostname equivalent) and the port number. If you were connecting directly to one of the actual IP addresses of your Mac, this would work without any further work on your part.
However, the most common type of Internet connection today involves one or more computers sharing a single public IP address. In this case, it is actually not your Mac which owns the public IP address, but a device such as a router (Airport base station, ISP-provided router, etc.). Each Mac instead has a private IP address, and the router manages directing each packet of data to the correct Mac.
This works more or less "automagically" for outgoing connections (e.g., browsing the web, checking email), but to make it work for incoming connections, the router must be instructed to forward incoming connections to the appropriate computer. This process is known as port forwarding (or sometimes, port mapping).
Setting up port forwarding
Unless you have a static public IP address for your Mac, to make your iGet Mobile server accessible from the outside Internet, you will need to configure your router to forward incoming incoming connections on the iGet Mobile port to the Mac that is running iGet Mobile. (By default, iGet Mobile uses port 55555, but you can change this if you wish.)
Unfortunately, there are as many ways of setting up port forwarding as there are routers. And some routers don't support this feature at all. (If you have such a router, you really should get a new one. Port forwarding is a very basic and essential feature these days.)
And while we cannot offer support for setting up all of the routers out there, we do have some Internet resources to help you with this configuration step:
- the iGet networking tutorials - Although written for the original iGet, and not specifically iGet Mobile, these in-depth tutorials cover the concepts and configuration details of setting up port forwarding, and also dynamic DNS.
- PortForward.com - This is a third-party web site that contains port forwarding instructions for a staggering number of routers, both new and old.
For further background about how Internet connections are made between client and server, proceed to the next section.