Jonathan, > Jonathan Hogg wrote: > Aren't Microsoft already "standardizing" this with their Universal > Plug and Play (UPnP) architecture? > I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I believe the concept is > that applications that understand this can communicate with the > router (the NAPT box in the case of SoHo networks) and request > ports to be opened externally and forwarded back to the host. I > think Microsoft's NetMeeting conferencing program supports this > already and there are a few ADSL modem/routers that implement it. That is the little my feeble understanding of it has grasped too. However, I still don't fully understand how it resolves the problem of originated-from-the-outside connections: Let's say there are 3 web servers in the inside, all three talk to the NAPT box and all three have the NAPT box open a translation port. The part I don't get is where the NAPT box chooses which one of the three gets the traffic without something like decapsulating the http header. Michel.