Typical configurations that allow Agents to connect to the Vault over the Internet involve placing the Vault inside a firewall and connecting to the Internet using a router.
Routers typically provide DHCP services. This means that computers inside the firewall ask the router to assign them a unique IP address in a given range, and that IP address would change from time to time. Routers typically support static IP addresses of computers inside the firewall. (Static IP addresses do not change and are assigned permanently to the computers.)
For example, a router could be configured as follows:
The router itself has an IP address 192.168.1.1.
The router runs a DHCP server that automatically assigns IP addresses to the computers inside the firewall in the range 192.168.1.50 to 192.168.1.255.
In this example, IP address 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.49 would be available as static IP addresses for computers inside the firewall. So you could, for example, set the TCP/IP protocol of the computer running the Vault as follows:
IP address 192.168.1.20
subnet mask 255.255.255.0
default gateway 192.168.1.1
After setting up the computer in this way, make sure you can browse the Internet from the computer. If not, double check that the IP address is within the correct range, and that the gateway's address is that of the router.
Thus far, you are allowing outbound Internet traffic from the computer using a static IP address. However, the firewall still does not allow any inbound traffic; that is, it does not route requests coming from outside of the firewall to reach the Vault. To achieve that, you would need to setup port forwarding on the router.
Port forwarding is a mechanism that routes requests coming from the Internet (into the router) on a given port to a specific computer inside the firewall. For example, suppose the Vault is listening on port 80 (which is the default port). You would configure the router to direct any incoming traffic on port 80 to IP address 192.168.1.20 (the Vault computer) port 80. Note that it is not necessary to use the same port number in the mapping. For example, you could configure the router so that requests on port 711 are directed to the Vault computer's port 80.