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Our company has a small office but we often work remotely. One of our service providers requires that we access their customer service portal from a known IP address. We don't all have dedicated IPs for our home connection so we were hoping to use our Airport Extreme base station to setup a forward.

I expected to find this in Airport Utility->Network.

There is a section for Port Settings which we're using to forward specific ports to a windows machine on our local 10.0.1.x network. However, I'd like to forward the inbound traffic on a specific port back out to a public IP address so it looks like we're all hitting the portal from the office IP address.

When I try to add another entry the IP address to forward to (labeled Private IP Address) is already set to 10.0.1.

Is this possible with an Airport Extreme?

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2 Answers 2

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I don't think this is possible.

Possibly you could turn on a web server on one of your computers and forward the requests to that from the airport basestation. It then could be forwarded from that computer to the address.

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  • This is exactly the approach we've decided to take. Apache runs by default on a Mac Mini and we have one of those internally so we'll just configure it to listen and then forward on. A kludge but it will get the job done.
    – cclark
    Commented Nov 1, 2012 at 8:20
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There is no way for the Airport Extreme to forward the request on it's own.
The router is there to forward traffic from your local network (LAN) out to the Internet (WAN) on an IP network. LAN traffic is routed with MAC addresses through a switch or Router. NAT allows the single IP of your router to be shared by the LAN clients through Network Address Translate (NAT) but it only allows inbound traffic if it is in reply to a specific outbound request. Port forwarding allows requests for specific services to come into to a single IP address. Like a mail server, ftp, or ssh. It is most often used for gaming.

What you are asking for is to allow an IP address that is not on your network to be allowed into your network and then translated as if it originated inside your network then the reply would come into your network and be sent back out to the IP address that originated the request. You may be able to set a proxy server up to do something like this but not an Airport Extreme Plus. It would expose your entire LAN to the Internet by opening up all incoming addresses because you would have the same problem as your vendor as to which incoming ip address to trust.

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