Pptp and Http Port Forwarding With Static Nat on a Cisco Router

Copyright (c) 2008 Don R. Crawleyinside source list 101 interface Ethernet0/1 overload"
Recently, a student at one of our seminars askedstatement to permit all inside hosts to use E0/1 to
about port forwarding on a router. She wanted toconnect to the Internet sharing whatever IP address is
allow PPTP clients to connect from the outside to aassigned to interface Ethernet E0/1.
VPN server on the inside. In this article, I'll explain howThe "overload" statement implements PAT (Port
to do it along with a quick look at using static NAT toAddress Translation) which makes that possible. (PAT
forward packets to a web server.allows multiple internal hosts to share single address on
Port Forwarding on a Cisco Routeran external interface by appending different port
Sometimes we have internal resources that need tonumbers to each connection.)
be Internet-accessible such as Web servers, mailThe statement "ip nat inside source static tcp
servers, or VPN servers. Generally, I recommend192.168.101.2 1723 interface Ethernet0/1 1723" takes
isolating those resources in a DMZ to protect yourincoming port 1723 (PPTP) requests on Ethernet0/1
office LAN from the bad guys, but regardless of howand forwards them to the VPN server located at
you choose to design it, the process involves192.168.101.2.
forwarding desired packets from the router's outsideYou could do something similar with a Web server by
interface to an internal host. It's really a fairly simplechanging port 1723 to port 80 or port 443. Here's what
process. Here's the configuration on a Cisco 2611that would look like:interface Ethernet0/1ip address
router:interface Ethernet0/1ip address 12.1.2.312.1.2.3 255.255.255.0ip nat outside
255.255.255.0ip nat outside!interface Ethernet0/0ip address 192.168.101.1
!interface Ethernet0/0ip address 192.168.101.1255.255.255.0ip nat inside
255.255.255.0ip nat inside!ip nat inside source list 101 interface Ethernet0/1
!ip nat inside source list 101 interface Ethernet0/1overloadip nat inside source static tcp 192.168.101.2 80
overloadip nat inside source static tcp 192.168.101.2 1723interface Ethernet0/1 80
interface Ethernet0/1 1723!access-list 101 permit ip any any
!access-list 101 permit ip any anyIn this example, the web server is located at
In the above configuration, Ethernet 0/1 is connected to192.168.101.2 and instead of forwarding PPTP (port
the public Internet with a static address of 12.1.2.3 and1723) traffic, we're forwarding HTTP (port 80) traffic.
Ethernet 0/0 is connected to the inside network with aObviously, you can configure your Cisco router in a
static address of 192.168.101.1. NAT outside issimilar manner to forward nearly any type of traffic
configured on E0/1 and NAT inside is configured on E0from an outside interface to an internal host.
0. Access-list 101 works in conjunction with the "ip nat