Destination ports and Source ports?

[Noel]

Trying to port forward, but have no idea what these port names mean. Can someone please enlighten me?

Thanks

[David D]

A port is just a number.

When a server runs, it will tell the operating system's network stack that it wants to listen on a port. (e.g. a web server will use port 80)

When software wants to talk to that server, it will send a network message and address it to that port number.

When you port forward you are, essentially, creating a server that listens on a port and then forwards the network messages to a different port (usually on a different machine).

The source port is where the message will originally be addressed to. The destination port is where you want it to be sent to instead.

So if you have a web server that you have configured to run on a different port, say 8080, then you could use port forwarding with a source port of 80 and a destination port of 8080 to forward traffic that was sent to port 80.