WinRoute Lite's primary security/routing component is based on a technology referred to as Network Address Translation (NAT). NAT allows a local network to use private (non-routable) IP addresses, yet still communicate out to the Internet. In other words, connections may be established outbound to the Internet, but connections arriving from the Internet are not allowed. By using port mapping however, public services like a WWW server or an FTP server, and others running on your private network may become accessible from the Internet.

Port Mapping is an advanced WinRoute feature that allows servers to be hosted securely behind NAT. Internet servers listen on well known ports for uninitiated connections. In other words, the server does not know in advance where a connection may come from. Examples of well known ports include HTTP (TCP port 80), SMTP (TCP port 25), Telnet (TCP port 23). If these types of well known services should be available to the Internet, then port mapping must be used to allow NAT to make exceptions for these services by redirecting these inbound connections to the appropriate local server.

Assigns your specific Port Mapping setting with the name (e.g. the name of the game application).

This is the application you want to pass through the Firewall. Depending on the type of hosted service, inbound TCP or UDP packets will arrive at the WinRoute computer on a specific port number. Based on this port number you may specify that certain packets will be routed to a specific computer/server behind the firewall.

Here you must specify the local server IP address that is listening for connections from the Internet. If the service is hosted on the WinRoute computer itself you can simply enable the option 'pass packet to this computer'.