Friday afternoon, I went thru the upgrade to V 2.0 with Smartlink. It went very smooth. Installed the ver 2 on my computer. Connected to the radio (6500), and of course it wanted to upgrade the radio. Pretty soon the purchase button showed up and I did that with a credit card. With the refresh, it was ready very quickly. Finally once connected with the new version, I setup the Smartlink stuff. I created a user, and configured the radio. When I tested the network, as I expected the port forwarding failed. I run a commercial type router and I expected I'd need to manually set the two ports.
I open up the router interface and forwarded port 4994 of tcp type to the radio and then 4993 of udp type to the radio. With that, the network passed. I tested it by running remote via vpn from my office and ran smartsdr from there, and it connected right up to Smartlink.
So far so good.
Then I upgraded the second radio. Same procedure and same flawless install.
The small hiccup was the port forwarding. I knew I needed to use different ports, because if I used the same ones, it would be going to the first radio.
So, I used port 4992 and 4991. But, and here is the biggie. While the traffic comes into my internet on one address, and it comes in on those second ports, and then gets forwarded to the internal ip address of the second radio, you still need to send it to the radio on port 4994 and 4993.
So on radio two, ip traffic comes in on the single Wan address for radio two, on 4992/4991, but then as it passes thru the router it gets directed to the second ip address of the radio, but it goes back to port 4994/4993. The radio only know about the two ports
Typically when you are passing port forwarding thru a router, you come in and pass thru on the same port number. In this case you don't, and need to translate back up!
Hope this may help someone else.
Posted 1 year ago
Ted VE3TRQ
NAT allows multiple (usually local or private) IP addresses behind a router to appear with a single (usually public) IP address to the outside world. The correct address behind the router is reached using port mapping - an outside port is mapped to a (potentially) different inside port and its associated IP address. That's what Brent is talking about. The outside traffic needs to get to an inside IP/port pair (referred to internally as a socket). NAT looks after the redirecting. In Brent's case, he is using port forwarding to control the process instead of allowing it to be automatic (which won't work in the case of multiple Flex radio servers on the private network).
I hope that doesn't sound just as obtuse. If so, maybe reading up on networking is advisable.
Ted VE3TRQ