How To Make P2P Programs to Work on Networks Using a Broadband Router

Configuring Windows XP Firewall (Cont’d)

Now click on Advanced tab. The screen shown in Figure 10 will show up. Click on the first Settings button, present in “Network Connection Settings” field.

Figure 10: Windows Firewall.

As you can see in Figure 11, there will be no configuration for our P2P program yet, so we must add two configurations there, one for each protocol (TCP and UDP).

Figure 11: Windows Firewall advanced settings.

Click on Add, then enter a name for this configuration (e.g., “eMule TCP Port”), the name of your computer or the IP address your computer is using, the TCP port number (4660) on both “External Port number” and “Internet port number” fields, check TCP and click Ok. In our case we used our computer name (“Gabe”).

If you don’t know the name of your computer, go to Control Panel, System, Computer Name tab. It will be listed there. If you prefer to use the IP address of your PC and don’t know it, click on Start, Run, Cmd and then type Ipconfig and hit Enter. This command will list the IP address your computer is using. We know that the IP address of your computer can change over time, but later we will need to configure our router to always assign the same IP address to our computer, so actually this won’t be really a problem.

Figure 12: Adding the TCP port used by eMule

Now repeat the process for the UDP port: click on Add, enter a name for this configuration (e.g., “eMule UDP Port”), the name of your computer or the IP address your computer is using, the UDP port number (4670) on both “External Port number” and “Internet port number” fields, check UDP and click Ok.

Figure 13: Adding the UDP port used by eMule.

Now you will see both configurations selected on Windows Firewall advanced settings tab, as shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14: The configurations to use eMule are now in use.

Click Ok and you are done with Windows Firewall configuration.

Our next step is configuring our router.