I have a TelstraClear cable connection in Wellington.

I have an elderly Belkin router, model F5D7230-4.

The router supposedly offers the capability to forward requests from a given port range to a given server on my LAN. And the browser-based UI for the router does let you specify a source port range, a destination port range, TCP or UDP, and a local IP address.

I can get this to work with standard ports. Eg, if I specify a range of 80-80, it WILL forward HTTP traffic to the host of my choice. If I open range 22 -22, I can SSH to a host of my choice. So far, so good.

However, I think I'd prefer to run on non-standard ports. I'd like to run SSH on a non-standard port. I'd like to have a security webcam on HTTP on a high-numbered port. And this just does not work. Eg, I can't get HTTP to work on port 8080 (or for that matter, 81).

Is this because TelstraClear is "helping" me and blocking all but a handful of ports, or is it my crummy old consumer-grade router? I am willing to go and buy a nice Linksys WRT54GL to achieve what I want, but not if the fault isn't at my end.

Update: on re-reading, I see haven't made it totally clear that I'm talking about enabling incoming connections from the internet to hosts on my home network, not the other way round.