I'll also chime in: since CouchDB (and most other HTTP servers) expect to use name-based virtual hosting (i.e. the HTTP Host: header), you will probably want a hostname. You can figure out your public hostname by going to, for example, http://www.showmemyip.com/. If you set this as the vhost name, if you visit it, it'll show what you expect.
Or, if you want something memorable, you can sign up for DynDNS or No-IP, both of which are free and give you a hostname pointing at your computer. You just have to run their updater software (I prefer No-IP because I've used them for a long time). Note that if you have an internal network with private addresses and are port forwarding, you'll run into some trouble. whatever.your-isp.net would resolve to an Internet-routable address, but your TCP/IP socket needs to talk to your internal address (192.168.x.x, 172.16.x.x, 10.x.x.x). If you have control over the DNS server on your internal network, you could make your DNS server return the internal IP address for your DynDNS/No-IP hostname. However, it's worth noting that you will run into this exact problem using IP addresses: 184.75.155.16:5984 will not work to access your server if 184.75.155.16 is a router that is port forwarding port 5984 to 192.168.0.1:5984 (with some exceptions: some routers are advanced and intelligently reroute your packet to the proper destination). --- Keith Gable A+, Network+, and Storage+ Certified Professional Apple Certified Technical Coordinator Mobile Application Developer / Web Developer On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:24 PM, Chris Sphinx <[email protected]>wrote: > thanks everyone for all of the suggestions and help. It's really helped me > learn more about how this all works
