Port forwarding asks for external IP address and nobody knows what to do

[WiseKind]

Hi. I created an account just to post this. My friend on Discord is trying to set up port forwarding for a dedicated game server, and that is something I have good experience with. So I helped him, except when he got to the menu it asked for the usual stuff and "External IP address", and I have never encountered this before. In fact, we seem to be the first people on Earth who have seen this. Tuitorials? Nothing. Forums? Nothing. My own past experience? On my router it only asks for external port, internal port, protocol (which I can usually say "all"), and internal IP. It never asks for an external IP. Yet this guy's Spectrum router asks for an external IP and I have no idea what it means.

All I'm asking is to know what external IP means when port forwarding asks you to enter it. Thank you for your time. If you think this belongs on a different forum, please let me know.

 

[JasKinasis]

It usually means your friends servers IP address as seen by other internet users. In other words, The IP address that other internet users would have to use to connect to his server.

This IP address is actually the IP address of his router

Either use the dig command to query a DNS resolver, like opendns:

dig @resolver1.opendns.com ANY myip.opendns.com +short

Or perhaps try visiting one of the many “what’s my IP” type sites from the host machine. Like https://myexternalip.com/

Edit:
Another thought about this.
Perhaps that field is so you can set it up to only allow incoming traffic from a particular external IP address to be forwarded.

Offhand, I’m not sure what you’d need to put if you wanted to allow all/any external IP’s to be able to connect.

Is there a detailed manual available online anywhere for that particular router? That would hopefully have information about this...