Setting Up a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)

Setting Up a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)
If you need to do some special port forwarding and router tweaking to get
your games working, you might find that you’re spending entirely too much
time getting it all up and running. Or you might find that you open up what
should be the right ports — according to the game developer — and that
things still just don’t seem to be working correctly. It happens — not all
routers are equally good at implementing port forwarding.
Here’s another approach that you can take — setting up a demilitarized zone
(DMZ). This term has been appropriated from the military (think the North/
South Korean border) by way of the business networking world, where DMZs
are used for devices such as Web servers within corporate networks. In a
home network, a DMZ is a virtual portion of your network that’s completely
outside of your firewall. In other words, a computer or device connected to
your DMZ will accept any and all incoming connections — your NAT router
will forward all incoming connections (on any port) to the computer connected
to the DMZ. You don’t need to configure special ports for specific
games because everything will be forwarded to the computer or device
which you have placed “on the DMZ.”
Most home routers that we know of will set up a DMZ for only one of your
networked devices, so this approach might not work for you if you’ve got two
gaming PCs connected to the Internet. However, for most people, a DMZ will
do the trick.
Although setting up a DMZ is perhaps easier to do than configuring port forwarding,
it comes with bigger security risks. If you set up port forwarding,
you lessen the security of the computer that the ports are being forwarded
to . . . but if you put that computer on the DMZ, you’ve basically removed all
the firewall features of your router from that computer. Be judicious when
using a DMZ. If you’ve got a computer dedicated only to gaming, a game console,
or a kid’s computer that doesn’t have any important personal files configured
to be on your DMZ, you’ll probably be okay. If you’re gaming on your
work computer — the one with all the classified work documents and your
downloaded credit card statements — you might want to think twice about
setting up a DMZ.
Depending on the individual router configuration program that comes with
your preferred brand of router, setting up a DMZ is really typically quite simple.
Figure 12-4 shows a DMZ being set up on a Siemens SpeedStream router/access
point. It’s a dead-simple process. In most cases, you need only to mark a check
box in the router configuration program to turn on the DMZ and then use a
pull-down menu to select the computer that you want on the DMZ.

Figure 12-4:
Setting up a
DMZ.