Port Forwarding on Router using same internal port number on different IP addresses

networkingport-forwardingremote desktoprouter

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The objective that I'm trying to achieve is to be able to connect to two computers that are behind the router using RDP. My logic is that I should be able to connect to the router externally on 2 different ports. Then internally the router should be able to forward me to 2 different IP addresses using the same port. i.e. once you hit the router it can connect to each of the different IP addresses on the same port. There should be no conflict there because they are different IP addresses.

The entry that I'm trying to add in the image is getting rejected with "Port Range is overlap" (sic). I assume that the ports labeled "Internal" are the ports to connect to on the internal IP addresses.

(As an alternative I could of course configure the port for RDP on one of the internal computers to listen on 3390 instead of the default 3389. In the past I've found this to be problematic.)

Why will the router not allow me to use the same internal port on different IP addresses?

Best Answer

I just ran into this problem and emailed Netgear customer support. Their response:

"NETGEAR home routers and modem routers do not support setting up port forwarding the same port numbers for different or same IP addresses. This feature is not supported or applicable with CG3000Dv2."

Seems like a silly feature for the router to lack. If anyone comes up with a workaround, I'd really like to hear about it.

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