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I connect to the internet through a VPN service that offers port forwarding. I'm wondering if there would be a point because the regular Ethernet connection I connect to the network through is behind a firewall/router which I don't have access to and wouldn't be able to portforward anyway. So is there a point?

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I think you might misunderstand (or maybe its me not understanding !!), but if I understand your question correctly, there is a point. Your VPN effectively bypasses the firewall/router. If you set up a port forward across the VPN, and you know the breakout point of the VPN, you could use that to communicate with your computer on that port without worrying about the configuration of the router or firewall.

Effectively a VPN creates a virtual connection to another point on the internet bypassing firewalls/routers in between it.

An easy way to demonstrate this is to do a traceroute to a known point which goes is routed throught he VPN when its active - with and then without the VPN and you will notice the hop to your router is eliminated when using the VPN.

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  • Oh yea that's right. So my question is: why do VPNs need portforwarding setup? If it has the option does that mean by default the VPN blocks all incoming connections?
    – Celeritas
    Jan 10, 2014 at 3:44
  • I can only speculate as its totally dependent on your VPN, but its possible that this is done for security reasons, or it could be that your VPN provider has multiple connections behind it shared by a single IP address (which is good for making it harder to do traffic analysis attacks and save IP space)
    – davidgo
    Jan 10, 2014 at 3:49
  • Yes they use shared ip addresses. Can you explain what that has to do with portforwarding?
    – Celeritas
    Jan 10, 2014 at 5:04
  • A port forward creates a map between an External and Internal IP address. Taking a (simple) example, lets say you run a web server on your PC and have purchased the VPN with the intention of getting access to the web server through a firewall. A port forward will map a port on the external IP address to a port on the IP address of your VPN, allowing you to connect to the External IP address and port and be forwarded to your Web Server. Stepping back from this case, some filesharing programs work better if you have ports forwarded back to your system.
    – davidgo
    Jan 10, 2014 at 6:29

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