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I'm bit of a newcomer when it comes to networking, firewalls and port forwarding - please bear with me:

I've just setup a dynamic DNS that points to my external IP and are handled through my Cisco router. Everything fine so far. When I visited my DNS through the browser, http://exampledynamicdns.com, I got redirected to the backend GUI of my router - kind of expected, but still not cool.

So to prevent my Router settings from being available on the interwebs, I did a port forward of port 80 to a non-existent IP on my LAN.

Is this a good practice or not?

Industrial
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1 Answers1

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Sure. This is an acceptable workaround.

Better would be to configure the router not to expose the web interface for external IPs, configure it to run on a separate port than 80, password-protect the web interface. But sometimes you have these very cheap routers that can't be configured that way. Buying a better one is recommended but not necessary.

mailq
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  • Thanks for your answer! It's actually a quite expensive Cisco small-business-class router, so I expect that it should have this feature. Do you have any idea on what this setting might be called? – Industrial Aug 17 '11 at 18:58
  • Read the manual. I have never seen this box before. And others can't help unless you tell model an version. – mailq Aug 17 '11 at 19:00