Hey guys. This is my first blog post on PMC but I have a real blog for my computer tech repair stuff. I feel that this will be more appropriate here as this is a problem I've been seeing here lately and involves Minecraft and hosting servers and such. For those not familiar with how I write my blogs, they are community based works which can be shared and are to help and can be seen as a reference to be used for my forum posts to see my point of few of why I say the things that I do. I'm not necessarily correct in all my blogs (or even complete) but in my experience these things work and they can be used to use as a foundation for more knowledge and motivate you in doing so, if I sound snobby don't take any offense to it. These aren't usually highly technical blogs because I like people to get the point of what I try to say, but can be requested if needed to explain further.


This is about sites like canyouseeme.org, this doesn't bother me as much as other things but it does bother me. Sites like this are abused by the hosting community a lot and it is dangerous as I will explain later. What these sites do, or what others use them for, is to check if their port forwarding is set up correctly to allow connections into their computers. This is a big issue because not only are you trying to bypass web browsers from doing a basic job of keeping the bad guys out from using malicious scripts, but you also show the entire world (or who is running that web server, or it may have gotten hacked, who knows), your IP with your open ports (not saying canyouseeme.org does this, but there's going to be people wanting that information).

That's very bad and instead sites like this are meant to test to see if everything is closed and working as it should. Just because a web browser says a port is closed doesn't mean your port is necessarily closed, your web browser may just be protecting you. It's also unreliable to use websites in such a manner. What this means is the ignorance of people is showing the "bad guys" (we are really enemies of ourselves) that there are people willing to show off their vulnerabilities and these "bag guys" will make redirects or other websites look legitimate and that's really bad because you simply do not know who's on the other end. This can also lead to remote access to/from your web browser or computer by any web browser as well!


One of the right ways to do this is use a program (PFPortChecker comes to mind) that will make a "server" on a port and tell a web server to connect to it, and if the server says (interally) "You sent me information to connect, but I can't connect!", it means there's nothing that can come in through that port. You keep fiddling with your port forwarding settings until you get it to say open. That's good because you're not trying to bypass web browser security and it's just a client-server program, although who's server it connects to can be unruly as well.

The best way (because it involves just you), is that you can connect to the port using your external IP (or a hostname that connects to your IP through a redirect) and connect to the port (You can get the external IP from whatsmyip.org). Start your server, open Minecraft and instead of using your internal IP (which isn't actually an IP Address by the way), use the external one to connect with. This will tell you reliably and securely whether your ports are working and can be "seen" to the Internet.



So that's it for this post and I hope you follow me at www.unityctt.wordpress.com and if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to send them and we may use it as inspiration for our next post.