Okay, so for the past week or so, I've been trying to set up a web server to...well...host a website. So I figured out how to install a LAMP server under Ubuntu and I got a free DNS hostname from dyndns.org. After configuring the router to use the dyndns hostname and forwarding the incoming port to the right computer, I could get the website......but only locally. Whenever anyone that wasn't in my network tried to get to the website, they couldn't find it, but I could in my network.
Anyway, then I tried to flash the router with different firmware because my friend told me that no-ip.org was better and our current firmware didn't support it. So after that broke the router, I tried to fix it, and eventually I got a new one which did support the firmware and was successfuly flashed (WRT54GL). Anyway, we got it to work on no-ip.org, but then it just showed the IP address in the URL bar, and has an annoying advert at the bottom of each page.
After getting annoyed with the various DNS services out there, I started to wonder if I could set up my own DNS hosting machine. So I found this HOWTO:
http://langfeldt.net/DNS-HOWTO/BIND-9/DNS-HOWTO-3.html
and it seemed to be the same as something I found before, which only really broke the website.
So, at long last, here are my questions:
1) why didn't dyndns work? It seemed fine, there were no advertisements, etc., but no one from the outside world could get to it
2) is it possible to get a DNS hostname without paying for it? The HOWTO uses bind, but is that what bind does?
3) How can I get my website to work?
Since you are using DynDns I will assume that you have a dynamic IP address.
Can you host your own DNS while having a dynamic IP? Yes you can, but it is a bad idea. Each time your IP address changes you will have to update your glues at the registrar which will take a few hours to update and means DNS will fail during this period.
Why didn't dyndns work? No idea, you haven't provided enough information to tell. Either way if you have something working is it worth the time to investigate something that didn't?
How can you get your website to work? That depends on whats wrong with it. The IP address showing up in the browser's address bar is nothing to do with DynDns or no-ip, that will be coming from something on your website or web server.
Can you provide the address for your website so I can look at it externally and examine the behavior? This is a rather hairy issue to fix without looking at it first hand.
hello
i have the same project and i also can install the web server. i did it on vmware. now i want to collect informations about what i can do to make it reachble from out side a local network.
the questions are:
do i need to by a fixe ip address or a domaine name?
what about DNS. do i have to install my own one?
what about bandwid?
please try to make as cleare as possible. thank you
Are you trying to host this out of your house, via a residential ISP? If so, you need to check with your ISP if this is allowed. Many ISP's block incoming port 80 requests.
GAH THREAD BUMPING
Anyway, I have a few answers. One thing you need to do is (in most cases) run this command
sudo tasksel install lamp-serverThat will install the lamp server. (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Now you can go to http://127.0.0.1 in your web browser to see if it works on your computer. The file it's displaying is /var/www/index.html
You can modify this file to change the website.
As for getting it linked to the internet, you can use no-ip.org as I did, and I'm sure their interface is easy enough to use and figure out if you have problems. Then, on your router, you need to forward port 80 traffic to the computer that has the web server on it.
You do this by finding the place that you forward ports and making a new application to forward port 80 to the IP address of your server. You can find out the IP by using ifconfig in bash and looking under the eth0 interface (or your wireless, depending on which one you're using--wired ethernet is recommended or it would probably be a slow site). Once that's done, you should be able to get to the site from anywhere.
By the way, if anyone sees anything wrong with what I've done (the following explains it) and sees it as the problem, do tell me.
Also, I did get a WRT-54GL router and put dd-wrt (linux firmware) on it. You might need to figure out how to flash a router too.
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