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BarnumFlag for United States of America

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How can I expose a web server on my LAN for external testing of website?

Hello All,

I am trying to allow external testers access to one of our internal servers.  To do this, I have attempted to enable port forwarding on our DSL router, a Netopia Cayman 3000, for port 7777 (port website is running on).  However, after doing so, I still cannot see the website running on the server.  The web browser reports page cannot be found.  So, a couple of questions.  Bear with me if they're ignorant - I'm just getting familiar with web hosting, etc.

1)  How do I access the site from an external location?  My initial attempt was to enter the WAN IP of our company, followed by :7777/applicationname.  After thinking about it, this seemed illogical since how would the dsl router know where my website is?

2)  There is a setting in the Cayman for "internal servers" (i am configuring through web interface).  Before setting what the Cayman calls the "pinhole" which is really just port forwarding, it says I have to setup the "internal servers."  This also requires me to set a port number.  I tried the same as above (7777), but when I tried to save it told me there was a conflict between the port forwarding settings and the "internal servers" setting.  I went back and changed the port to 4444.  Anyone know what the "internal servers" setting does on a netopia cayman 3000?

3)  I have basic authentication setup on the IIS server, which should allow a domain login to be entered once the website is exposed.  Any security concerns I might be overlooking with this?

Anyway, thanks in advance.  I know it's a lot of stuff.
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giltjr
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How are you trying to access the Web server, IP address or host name?  If using host name, does the host name you are using resolve to the correct IP address?  Which should be the public IP address.
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Hi -
I was trying to access the server via the static IP address assigned to the router...
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Elton Pascua
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Did you double check to make sure that TCP port 7777 was being forwarded, and not just UDP port 7777?
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Did you change the port number for http for the default internal server to 7777?  If so, change it back to 80.  Then you should be able to setup the pinhole to forward port 7777 to port 7777 of your web server.
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Hi Folks, thanks for all the response.

The website works on the internal lan ok.  I made sure that it was TCP being forwarded.  I'm going to try several of the options suggested above, and I'll let you know what I find out!

Thanks
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etosan

First depending on your equipment, you probably can check the outside view only with some computer outside of your LAN.
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Thanks for all the help.  I was able to get this working after much screwing around with the gateway, which wasn't cooperating at all (someone else had set it up in a screwy way).  I added an IP map instead of a pinhole.
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Very helpful comments in determining the cause of my problem.