by Gina Trapani

Recent Lifehacker features have covered how to run a personal web server , how to control your home computer from anywhere , and how to set up a personal wiki . For users on a home network with a router installed, home servers are not accessible from the Internet because of many modern routers' built-in firewall.

Today we'll cover how to open up specific ports on your router to allow access to a home server behind a firewall.

Please note: this tutorial is for advanced users. Your router's firewall is there to protect you from evildoers who try to control your computer over the Internet. Make sure that any service you expose to the Internet is secured with a strong password.

Enabling outside access to an internal computer on a home network requires that you set up NAT – "network address translation," or port forwarding. Forwarding sends requests for ports on the outside of your firewall to the right computer on the inside.

For instance, someone on the outside requests a page from a web server at your router's IP address. With port forwarding viagra brand cheap set up, your router knows to forward requests for port 80 (a web server's default port) to the computer with the web server running only – and none of the others on your network.

Port forwarding is only necessary when you want to expose a service to computers on the Internet outside your firewall. Some servers you'd want to do that with:

• a home web server
• a personal wiki
• a BitTorrent client uploading as well as downloading
• a VNC server
• a home FTP server

While all routers vary slightly, port forwarding is fairly simple. Here's how to get it set up:

Step 1. Determine your server's internal IP address.

All the computers on your internal network have an IP address which looks something like 192.168.0.XXX. Get on the computer with the server running and open a command window. Then type ipconfig to determine the machine's internal address, like so:

In this case, as you can see, the server's internal IP address is 192.168.0.11.

Step 2. Configure your router.

Most routers have an web-based administrative interface that's located at http://192.168.0.1. (This address does depend on your model. Consult your router user guide for more info.)

Once you've gone to the router administration, entered the password (if one is set up), there should be an area called "Port forwarding." There, you'll set the port number that requests from the Internet will come in, and the internal computer that should fulfill those requests. Here's a screenshot of my Netgear router set up to port forward 5900 to my VNC server, which is at 192.168.0.11 (see above). Click on the image to see a larger version.

Here's a table of common services and their default port numbers.

Any other services you port forward for that I missed? Add it in the comments to this article or drop me a note at tips at lifehacker.com.

By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes | April 2, 2009, 4:45am PDT

It’s time for Microsoft’s policy of tying the availability of Windows Updates to Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation to end.

Brian Livingston writing for Windows Secrets had the following to say:

“It’s ridiculous to say that Microsoft provides all security updates to Windows users, whether or not they pass Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation. No, Microsoft doesn’t.

“First of all, a system that fails WGA is restricted in using Microsoft’s update and download sites.

“WGA has a reputation for rating some PCs as unlicensed when in fact they’re completely legitimate. For this reason, many people exit Windows Update at this point and turn off Automatic Updates (if it was enabled) rather than risk disabling their expensive computers.”

Windows Update and WGA are interlinked . If you have a PC that doesn’t validate as running a genuine copy of Windows (or you are uneasy about putting it through the validation process for whatever reason), then you are limited to receiving only those updates that are labeled as “Critical”. While this still gives users access to the most important updates, it means that users miss out on updates classified as “Important” or “Moderate”.

To make matters worse, back in 2006 someone at Microsoft decided to push an update for the WGA mechanism (KB905474) through the Windows Update mechanism and marked it as a “Critical” update. This mixing of genuine security updates and marketing propaganda was an enormous abuse of trust on Microsoft’s part (Apple later pulled a similar stunt when it pushed Safari to Windows users though its software update mechanism) and shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.

It’s now time for Microsoft to disconnect WGA from all Windows related updates. Same goes from Office Genuine Advantage and updates for Microsoft Office. The current situation doesn’t make good sense. I don’t have a problem with Microsoft demanding that users wanting additional content (games, new apps, templates viagra and alcohol and so on) have to go through a validation process, but ALL updates should be available to ALL users, irrespective of whether users are running a genuine copy of Windows or not. Users who have unwittingly been sold a counterfeit copy of Windows shouldn’t be penalized and have their security compromised. In fact, when it comes to security updates, even those who know they are running a pirated copy of Windows should get access to all updates. It’s in everyone’s best interests that as many machines as possible are patched.

If you're like everybody else who uses the Web, I imagine you use Google's popular search engine to look up information about different topics. Well, just like about any other Web site out there, Google sets cookies on your browser for various reasons, such as remembering preferences.

With Google however, it keeps cookies that track user searches and stores them on its database for possible future needs. Some of these cookies are set to last for 30 to 35 years into the future. That is some time to keep search information, don't you think? Although Google doesn't keep actual user's names and addresses, it does assign your system a unique ID that is complete with your IP address.

Now, I'm not trying to make Google out to be the bad guys. I actually think that they are a great company. In an industry where I have seen a lot of companies gauge their users for more and more to become successful, Google has always been there for the users, all the while keeping the rest of the industry on its toes. But, it still doesn't mean I want my cookies stored in my browser or on their server for an umpteen amount of years.

So, the cookies might not bother you. You know and trust Google, so why worry? There are a couple reasons I choose to worry.

1.) It's my job.

2.) AOL, MSN and Yahoo have already given up some information like this to the government upon request and this is the information Google was being suspended for at the beginning of this year.

3.) Even though Google's motto is “Don't Be Evil,” there is no telling what will happen in the future. The IT industry is volatile at best and business makes strange bedfellows. With Google offering more services, such as e-mail and blogs, they have much more information about users than they used to. This, to me, means that If Google changes their mission statement, they will have potentially tons of information on users.

4.) My final reason for the Google cookie paranoia is hackers and data leaks. This information can be invaluable to certain entities; so much so that not only hackers, but employees have been stealing information as well, so why leave it out there?

So, what do you do about this? Well, you can clean out your cookies regularly (which you should do anyway), but if you have a lot of Web settings you don't want to change, there is another way.

I found this the other day and I thought it would come in handy as an online security utility. It's called GoogleAnon and it helps you conduct Google searches anonymously. GoogleAnon sets your Google GUID buy viagra on line to all zeros so you can perform search after search without leaving a trace as to whom you are.

GoogleAnon is a service that you save as a favorite in order to use. You can also drag it from your browser bookmarks to your personal links for quicker access. Once you have the GoogleAnon setup, open up an Internet browser and navigate to google.com. Now, access the GoogleAnon, which is in your favorites and you should see the following box come up, which shows your assigned Google ID.

Select OK and it will zero out your ID. Once this is done, you are taken back to the Google preference page to reset three to four different settings that are usually stored by Google cookies. Select OK again. Now you are ready to use Google without worrying about being observed for future endeavors, projects or experiments.

GoogleAnon should work on the following browsers: IE4+, Opera, AOL, Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox.

Click here to access GoogleAnon. Once there, scroll up a little and look for the little box that says GoogleAnon. You're going to save it to your Favorites and then close and reopen your browser, so it will displayed in your Favorites list. Just follow all the instructions to get started.