Network gurus - access web server from outside your lan query

Hi folks
I'm still messing around with this stuff -- I've got apache Web server running on two different machines on my lan . machine A is local host and machine B is wulf is a different server on the LAN, real machine not a VM.

e.g for A accessing B - with php and phpmyadmin






with machine B as local host B can access A (as refur/test.php) and itself as localhost/test.php etc.

So both machines work both ways across a LAN.So the listening ports are fine - not restricted to local host.

So base networking is fine -- now I need external access from outside the LAN !!. That's the bit where I get stuck.

What I want now -- I know the external IP address assigned by the IP -- but what do I do if I'm on a laptop outside the LAN. I don't have any problem with assigning static IP addresses to Machines A and B but how do I access them. Listening on port 80 or 8080 presumably for HTTP and some type of port forwarding.

Any help on this one please. There's plenty here using / maintaining web servers. The main thing I want to do is to access files from a 20TB disk - I just want to be able to send and receive files -- I don't need any programs to execute them directly from the remote server or stream video from that server. I don't need to logon to the remote machine as a remote desktop, I just want files from it and to send to it and also some mysql queries from a MariaDB (mySQL) type DB on it hence my test with myphpadmin, plus retrieving data into an excel spreadsheet from the DB. Those all work across my LAN, so no problems with that part of this "gig",

A windows laptop will be used for accessing the remote server.

Thanks gurus,

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

What I want now -- I know the external IP address assigned by the IP -- but what do I do if I'm on a laptop outside the LAN. I don't have any problem with assigning static IP addresses to Machines A and B but how do I access them. Listening on port 80 or 8080 presumably for HTTP and some type of port forwarding.

Any help on this one please. There's plenty here using / maintaining web servers. The main thing I want to do is to access files from a 20TB disk - I just want to be able to send and receive files -- I don't need any programs to execute them directly from the remote server or stream video from that server. I don't need to logon to the remote machine as a remote desktop, I just want files from it and to send to it and also some mysql queries from a MariaDB (mySQL) type DB on it hence my test with myphpadmin, plus retrieving data into an excel spreadsheet from the DB. Those all work across my LAN, so no problems with that part of this "gig",

A windows laptop will be used for accessing the remote server.

Thanks gurus,

Cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

I assume you meant that the external ISP is assigned by the ISP, not the IP. Yeah, to access any device from the Internet, you need to hit a routeable IP address.....this would be the one that you get from your ISP. So, you take that IP address that you have received from your ISP and typically you register a DNS name to it, so people don't have to remember that you are 182.12.51.8, instead they can hit jimbo.example.com.

On your router, you then create port-forwarding rules that says anytime inbound traffic comes to this IP on port 80/443, redirect that traffic instead to my internal IP address of 192.168.1.15 on port 80 (this would be where you have your phpmyadmin running). if you wanted to access a machine over RDP, you would do port forwarding on port 3389 to your internal machine on port 3389, etc. Your ISP may block some of these ports thought, for examle SMTP (on port 25) is commonly blocked as they don't intend for you to run servers.

pparks1 said:

I assume you meant that the external ISP is assigned by the ISP, not the IP. Yeah, to access any device from the Internet, you need to hit a routeable IP address.....this would be the one that you get from your ISP. So, you take that IP address that you have received from your ISP and typically you register a DNS name to it, so people don't have to remember that you are 182.12.51.8, instead they can hit jimbo.example.com.

On your router, you then create port-forwarding rules that says anytime inbound traffic comes to this IP on port 80/443, redirect that traffic instead to my internal IP address of 192.168.1.15 on port 80 (this would be where you have your phpmyadmin running). if you wanted to access a machine over RDP, you would do port forwarding on port 3389 to your internal machine on port 3389, etc. Your ISP may block some of these ports thought, for examle SMTP (on port 25) is commonly blocked as they don't intend for you to run servers.

Click to expand...

Hi there

Thanks for the info.

Port 8080 for me is also available so using Putty and tunelling might work. Port 3306 also for ODBC / mariadb queries also available. Not sure on how ISP's regard use of Port 80 but no questions on 8080 (at least here). HTTP erver can be set to use 8080. Works OK on my LAN with a bit of messing with the config files.

SMTP port 2525 also allowed too - but I'm not interested in running a mail server. Port 25 isn't allowed. But if you know some smtp native commands you can still send email via command line etc without going through this stuff -- complex though !!.

E,g something like this

#!/bin/bash
# Send email from bash
# hrafn simple script to send simple email with your IP address (external)

read -p "Enter SMTP email server address: " server
read -p "Enter SMTP Port: " port
read -p "Enter Your Email Address: " from
read -p "Enter Recipient's Email Address: " to
# get your public IP address
myip="$(dig +short myip.opendns.com @ReSolver1.opendns.com)"
# create message
function mail_input {
echo "ehlo $(hostname -f)"
echo "MAIL FROM: <$from>"
echo "RCPT TO: <$to>"
echo "DATA"
echo "From: <$from>"
echo "To: <$to>"
echo "Subject: Testing SMTP Mail"
echo " "
echo "Your public internet address is "
echo $myip
echo " "
echo "finished"
echo "."
echo "quit"
}

mail_input | netcat $server $port || err_exit

of course needs to be more sophisticated with security etc but you should get the idea. !!

Don't forget to finish the inline text with the "." line before the SMTP quit command.

Thanks for your info though -- will play around with that -- I did mean ISP rather than IP of course !!!

I'm not madly keen on RDP over the internet -- as I said I don't need to access the server as a workstation - just to access the stuff on its shared 20 TB HDD.

Cheers
jimbo