can someone explain exactly what port forewarding is? in trying to solve another problem (relating to BitTorrent) people keep telling me to "forward" a range of ports (i think its like 6884-6889 or somthing?) but i don't know how to do this or what it means. i have a hunch that it relates to a firewall or NAT somehow.

"i have a hunch that it relates to a firewall or NAT somehow." Yes and no. Port forwarding is when a network host (any computer networked) accepts packets on one port or range of ports, and then forwards them to another port or range of ports. This is usually done with a router (the router may have NAT, it may have a firewall - port forwarding is really just static routing and doesn't require any of those features). Let's say I have my LAN with a router as the gateway. I have an HTTP webserver (maybe Apache) on one computer behind the router. A webserver generally runs on port 80, but for whatever reason I choose not to run it on port 80 (maybe I don't have root and can't bind to a priveleged port). Instead, I run my server on port 8000. But I still want people to connect to my server through the router. So in the router I set up port forwarding. I configure the router to accept TCP requests on port 80 and forward them to my webserver via TCP on port 8000. Explain your problem - for starters do you have a firewall between your machine and the Internet?

If you are using som kind of "router" to get to the net (I mean, you are using NAT) al the computers inside your network cannot be reachable from outside. You can get to the wolrd but they can not start a transmition against you. The problem is that Bittorren, Kazaa, emule, etc act like a server in some cases, and if you are using NAT, you are going to lose a lot of connectivity with the net. The solution is to forward the server ports of that kind of software in your gateway (router/modem/etc).

Maybe you already said it, but im german and do not understand everything. Can you say what exactly to do, to foreward ports??

Use babelfish. Welchen router hast du? Es sollte spezifische Anweisungen online haben.