Unable to access Apache web service

[pfarnone]

I'm a beginner at installing/configuring Apache so I'm hoping someone can help with this. I installed Subversion v1.6.12 and Apache HTTP Server v2.2.15 using default settings on a Windows 2003 R2 server hosted by 1&1. Another colleague configured Apache but we can't access the Apache web service remotely. We can access it in a remote desktop session on the server itself.

When connected to the server via remote desktop,

http://74.207.165.109/index.html

returns a page locally. The same URL times out from our home machines with a message "Problem loading page - The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading."

I can ping the server from home. All local and external firewalls have been disabled until we get this working.

Can anyone please tell me some things to check?

Thx...

 

[Noway2]

My first thought was that you had an issue with the Apache and setup for the subversion. Based on your post and the experiment below, I think you have a more fundamental problem.

I tried running a ping on the address and did not get through. I then ran a traceroute and went as far as 216.221.97.74. which is a server belonging to srtnet.com.

At this point, the traffic was blocked.

Since traceroute uses ICMP, it is possible for it to both work and have a port 80 (web site connection) not work and vice versa. In this case, I can neither access the website or trace to it.

It would appear that something at this device is blocking the connection. When you remote desktop in, you are probably going around this connection.

 

[pfarnone]

Sorry, I am paranoid about giving out the actual IP address but here it is...74.208.166.109.

 

[Noway2]

I understand your feelings and a small dose of paranoia is a good thing with regards to web applications. The crawlers and bots have undoubtedly found your page long before you posted to this forum, as that is what they do. Any public (i.e. routable) IP address will get scanned and pinged several times a day by the scanners out there.

Anyway, I am able to access a page and I get the following: "Page served by CollabNet Apache server at 74.208.166.109"

Assuming that is correct, then your site and access to it appear to be functional. If you are having trouble accessing from different locations, try running traceroute (or tracert on Windows) may help you to determine where the communication break is occurring.

Ping, which is the basis of traceroute uses the ICMP messaging. Higher level applications use different protocols, so as I mentioned it is possible to get ping and traceroute to function but not establish a connection.

If you still have problems connecting and pings work, I would try to connect via telnet (on port 80) and see if I could emulate the browser connection. A packet sniffer and / or tcpdump may be helpful in that it will show you whats in the packets.

One possibility to consider, especially if things appear intermittent, is a bad connection creating noise.

You can also look in Apache's access and error logs. That may show you if something funky happened in the connection and handshake process.

 

[pfarnone]

Thanks Noway2 for your input...much appreciated.

The problem was fixed by going into the Local Security Settings and changing the packet filter settings within IP Security Settings on Local Computer to "Open HTTP/S incoming" (which was unchecked)