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New Contributor

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2 Messages

Monday, October 5th, 2020 12:00 PM

Port Forwarding and DNS

I'm encountering a couple of strange issues that I was hoping to get some guidance on resolving.

 

The first is with port forwarding. I have a web server and have opened up port 80 and am forwarding that to the appropriate internal IP address. When I try and access the website from an exterior network, such as on my cell phone using my data plan, or a starbucks wifi access point, the website is accessible and visible. From my internal network, the website is inaccessible. I can edit the "hosts" file on my local computer to point the web address to my internal IP and it works just fine, but if I leave the "hosts" file alone it's inaccessible. I would prefer to not have to maintain hosts files on every computer on my network (and there are other devices like my phone that I don't have the ability to set up such a workaround). Is there a setting in the router that I'm perhaps missing?

 

The second issue is that we have our own DNS servers. When I try and put in the IP addresses of the DNS servers and save the configuration, the router appears to revert to selecting the Comcast DNS servers instead and does not save the IP addresses of my servers.

 

For reference, we have the following modem/router from Comcast:

 

Model:CGA4131COM
Vendor:Technicolor
Hardware Revision:2.3

Official Employee

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298 Messages

4 years ago

Hi! Thanks for your patience and for reaching out to Comcast for help with the port forwarding and DNS server concerns. I would be delighted to help with this and do all that I can to provide a solution as quickly as possible. To look into this further, would you mind sending a private message with your name, address, and account number or a phone number linked to the account for security purposes?

New Contributor

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2 Messages

4 years ago

Spoke with Comcast service rep and they were not helpful. Has anyone experienced issues like this in the past?

 

For the first issue, the "hosts" file workaround is a nice temporary fix, but as I mentioned, it's going to be a pain to maintain hosts file on every machine, is a pain with laptops where I sometimes will be inside our network and sometimes outside (meaning that I'll have to constantly be changing the hosts file if I want to access it in different locations), and won't work for devices like my phone.

 

For the DNS issue I was told that they couldn't help with issues with my equipment, however the issue appears to be with their equipment not saving the IP address and configuration correctly. I know the IP addresses are correct as I am able to access the equipment on my network at those addresses. The router just doesn't want to save the configuration for one reason or another.