Airport Extreme & Remote Access for database application

Question

Hi There,
I have spent an entire week of my time between apple, apple consultants and networking experts trying to get a access remotely to a simple database program inside an wireless network. I have read the discussions on remote access thru the AEBS and port mapping.
I'm hoping an user here can help me with a foolproof solution that the 'apple experts' can seem to design?
All that is required to get this program up and running remotely is the ip address of my computer inside my wireless network. I have set that this computer to a static address but since my dsl provider uses dynamic IP's this doesn't seem to work (or it does for about 12 hours until the IP address of my AEBS is changed). Will port mapping work for me or is my only solution an up-charged static IP?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions......the thought of spending another week on this is frightening!

Answer 1

If your ISP is refreshing the dynamic host configuration of the public ip address assigned to the ISP provided router you will need to request a static ip address from your service provider.
The addresses that are used "inside of your network" are private ip addresses. If you are using the (1) public address for your router (APE)(Apple airport extreme) from the ISP what you are trying to do will not work very well since your router (APE) will use the Public IP address to provide access to the public internet for your private network using the private ip addresses you have used to create your subnet and told your router (APE) about. Three private IP address schemes can be used for a private internet. One for each class. Class A 10.x.x.x/8, Class B 172.16.0.0/12 and Class C 192.168.0.0/24. Translated using dynamic NAT (network address translation with overload) making your LAN hosts using private IP addresses to seem as if they are using a public ip address allowing access to the public internet where only public ip addresses can be used.
PAT (port address translation) is what you are trying to accomplish. For PAT you must have a valid public ip address from your ISP and a private address from your network assigned to interesting host. Use the private ip assigned to the interesting host in the port mapping panel of airport admin that you wish to allow access to via the global internet as well as the tcp or udp port number for the traffic to be directed. For example port 5003 for FileMakerPro or port 20 and 21 for ftp. You should also implement security policies to protect your network and hosts.
Since you said that it works for 12 hours you must have the basics set up correctly. All you need now is to get a static ip address assigned to you from your ISP or use a service such as http://www.dyndns.com/
Hope I didn't ramble on too much