Dmz?

[silkman]

should this be enable or disable? And what does this do? Sorry kinda new to this. I have it at disbale right now. I have 3 computers thats connected to this router. Would it effect online gaming on the other comp if i leave this disbale cause the it was enable on the factory setting but somehow i think i'm losing my connecting every 10min with this enable. So need some advice here. On or Off? The good and the bad.

[YeOldeStonecat]

It's usually not turned on by default.

DMZ on consumer grade broadband routers, is basically bypassing your routers NAT firewall. Your operating system has over 65,000 ports..which services run on.

A broadband router, by default, hides all of those...hence its basic firewall protection. However...if you need to connect to a computer behind the router...from across the internet, you'll need to expose the port(s) that the service you are using connects on. You'll find a port forwarding section on your router to do that. Say you want to run a Quake 3 server..you'd open/forward port 27,960 to your "server". Or if you wanted to connect to a computer using Remote Desktop Connection, you'd open/forward port 3389. Or if you wanted to run a web server from home, port 80.

The smart thing to do is only open/forward the ports necessary to make your service available....and keep allllllllllll the other ports hidden.

However...there is a dummy approach to this...called the "DMZ". You put your computers LAN IP address in the DMZ..and all 65,000 plus ports are available. It's not protected at all. This is a BAD thing. You'll find it rather quickly infected, and falling under hacking attempts and all that other bad stuff that happens to computers with public IP addresses.