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→Port Forwarding
== Port Forwarding ==
Port forwarding is used in conjunction with masquerading when the Fedora system is acting as a gateway to the internet for an internal network of computer systems. Port forwarding allows traffic arriving at the firewall via the internet on a specific port to be forwarded to a particular system on the internal network. This is perhaps best described by way of an example.
Suppose that a Fedora system is acting as the firewall for an internal network of computers. One of the systems on the network is configured as a web server. The domain web site hosted on this system is configured with the public IP address behind which the Fedora firewall system sits. When an HTTP web page request arrives on port 80 the Fedora system needs to know what to do with it. By configuring port forwarding it is possible to direct all web traffic to the internal system hosting the web server, either continuing to use port 80 or diverting the traffic to a different port on the destination server. In fact, oirt forwarding can even be configred to forward the traffic to a different port on the same system as the firewall.
