Hi Joseph, Just noticing your comments on having a local webserver up and running... >Secondly I too would like to allow access from the Internet to my web >server, at some time in the future, but I really don't have a clue as >to how to go about it. To give a very short checklist... 1. Install a webserver, 2. liberate access through the firewall on your local machine, 3. configure the router of your home/office network (this will generally imply giving the machine with the webserver a fixed IP address within your local network) to pass on requests to the mechine running the webserver 4. liberate access through the firewall of your router
>I allowed Internet access to the server, via my firewall, and asked a >few select friends to try and view my web pages a few times, >giving them my ip address, but so far no one has been able to access >my web server. > >Is there something I am missing here? What you might be missing is that many ISPs don't like people running servers at home. Many ISPs for that purpose block traffic to often used ports like 80 (http) and 21 (ftp). One way to circumvent this is choosing another port for the server, like say 8080. In this case visitors will have to surf to http://your.ip.address:8080/ to see the site. Additionally, you will have to do one of two things: 1. configure the webserver to listen to port 8080 and configure the router to transfer traffic for your.ip.address:8080 to local.ip.of.server:8080, or 2. configure your router to transfer traffic for your.ip.address:8080 to local.ip.of.server:80, in which case the default port configuration of the webserver will be correct. >Do I need to sign up to one of those dynamic ip web sites. I don't No. You only need to do that if you want to have a fixed domain name (say: www.mysite.com/ ) associated to a constantly changing IP address. In case your ISP doesn't provide you with a static IP but gives you a dynamic IP it maybe handy though, as you will not need to constantly check what your public IP is and provide that again and again to people from the outside who want to have a look. >I have been able to configure another computer on my network to be >able to access my web server (on my main computer) both using >microcrap O/S's, but I have been told to use a linux box if I want to >allow Internet connections because it is much more secure than MS >Bindoze. Is this true? Yes, *but*... if you have a local webserver for testpurposes only I wuldn't bother too much. I'll tell you how I work, mabe it is of use to anyone else... First of all, to have things permanently on line, simply hire server space with some ISP. Nowadays very cheap, and you won't have to worry about securing the server, dynamic IP addresses, or leaving some computer at home always on (electricity bill and noise). Then for development/testing purposes I have a machine installed dual boot (Windows 2000 [much more unix like and flexible to configure user rights than XP or Vista] & Debian Linux). Then I got myself one of those NAS devices running a Samba server. The greatest invention ever! Now independent of which OS I use, I always have user-rights controlled access to my documents, because the Samba server takes care of authentication, independent of my OS of the moment. The file server has a drive letter assigned/is mounted on startup of the OS of choice and either Apache under Windows or under Linux accesses the NAS (just set the webroot directory to be on the network drive). Now I can develop and test using any OS without worrying about copying the latest version to a disk accessible by the other OS. As soon as my development machine is switched off, the test site is off-line as well (but that doesn't matter, because for for clients who want a preview of the site-in-development a copy goes to a /demo/ directory on the hired server and they are able to access it any time, independent of my machine at home being on, off, just rebooting, or whatever). External visitors are blocked from accessing the development webserver as they don't need to access it for a preview, which leaves it all much less vulnerable. The server is visible within my homenetwork though, so I can test it using another machine. So far I like the way this all works, but of course others may have different opinions on how this is best done. Marc PS: sorry, it's a bit off topic, no PHP mentioned, but the question of what/how to install (on) a development machine gets asked so often on this list...
