Site only visible locally

[ScreamerChaotix]

I've had this problem before, but after a few weeks of playing around I still can't produce the answer. I registered a domain name, set up my router to allow the http connection to go through to the machine running apache, and set up all my html files. Everytime I enter in my site url or ip into another machine on my LAN, I get right to the site. Good so far, but here's the bizarre part...no one outside the LAN can see it. They can enter the url or the ip, and still nothing. Naturally I assumed this had something to do with allow/deny settings, but I haven't touched them at all. I should note I'm using a cable modem, so another possibility I considered was that my ISP was filtering connections to port 80 on their network to prevent people from eating up bandwidth...but if that was so, wouldn't my dns requests be blocked on their way back into the LAN? (Or should I admit I know nothing about dns and just shutup?) I haven't yet checked to see if people on the cable network can see it, and I'm not sure when I'll get the chance...but if anyone has any advice I'd be most appreciative, there isn't much point in having a site that can only be seen locally.

 

[ScreamerChaotix]

Looks like my second hypothesis was correct, the cable provider doesn't allow people to have sites on their network. I do apologize for posting the question before checking everything, but if nothing else, this could serve as a heads up to the other people on cable modems...IT'S NOT TRUE NET ACCESS! The tech support guy claimed it was for "security reasons," but I can't help but think he means bandwidth.

 

[smah]

Just an FYI, you don't have to host on port 80 - you can run a webserver on a different port. I haven't set this up, but it's not uncommon to have your web server listen on port 8080 or some such port for just this reason. The question is - will it be active enough for your ISP to notice?

 

[ScreamerChaotix]

Excellent idea, can't believe I didn't think of it. Even if they do notice it, it's worth it just to pull one over on them.

Unfortunately I had plans of creating a more popular site someday, and sending people to port 8080 is a bit of an annoyance. Ah well, it's better than having them VNC into a machine behind my router to see the site that way

 

[smah]

I'm sure there's a way to do this so that your users won't even notice- maybe in vhosts.conf? If that's not it, I'm sure someone else knows how to make Apache listen on a different port.

 

[smah]

ScreamerChaotix, I found something for you:
thread65-201488

 

[ScreamerChaotix]

Thanks, I've been trying to get it working all night but still no dice. I edited the httpd.conf file so that both "port" and "listen" are set to 8080, but that didn't work. So I tried setting listen to "*", but it wouldn't accept anything except a valid ip. I'm sure I'll figure it out, it's probably something simple I'm missing.

 

[ScreamerChaotix]

Ah, there we go, a few modifications and we're in business. Thanks for the help.