ICS Port Forwarding Failing to Work

I currently have an ICS host machine with two NICs.

In one NIC Is a cable router and in the other a switch and from there
to all my computers.

Every single machine gets internet properly.

My other problem is now, if I go to the ICS host, right click the
Internet NIC, tell it to add a service for whatever, enable it, then
apply it, the port forwarding doesn't actually work, even though I made
sure I selected the right port, IP, protocol, etc. I even made sure I
could properly ping the machine from the ICS host.

When I open a port for uTorrent, it seems to work and uTorrent is
happy. Also, do not assume that I use uTorrent for illegal activity. There are actual legal stuff, like Linux downloads. P2P File Sharing is not illegal, sharing of copyrighted content is.

Why when I try to open a port for a server or something on the ICS
host, it doesn't wanna work?

 

Welcome to the forum RedPenguin2.

Have you considered connection the router directly to the switch then letting each PC connect through the router. You would thereby bypass any Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) problems. Enable NAT on the router so that you can share your external IP address (and get some protection from trivial port access), and I'd recommend installing personal firewalls on all the PCs.

 

Since the bit torrent forward works, you know that in principle that you can forward through ICS.

As one guess, your ISP is not permitting the server service entry and is blocking it downstream.

Assuming that is not the issue, be sure the IP of the destination computer is properly specified. For the ICS Host computer, you use 127.0.0.1 and not the computer's IP: http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...port/kb/articles/q308/1/27.ASP&NoWebContent=1

Finally, remember to open the firewall for the ports used on the server host computer.