Routing

[ahmedtheking]

Apologies in advance if this is the wrong category!

I've got an issue with routing a web site. A client of mine hosts their web site themselves. They have their computer and the server behind the same router/firewall. I can access the web site easily (I am external BTW) but the client cannot access the web site via its domain. Any ideas what settings need to be fiddled with?

[jdMorgan]

The problem is that when trying to access his own local site by domain, the result is that he asks his router to make both an outgoing connection and an incoming connection at the same time, because he ends up using the public IP address of his server, and not its local network address. The router can't make a two-way connection for one packet, so this cannot work.

The easiest solution is to go into the file named "hosts" on each of his LAN computers, and define the domain name (and each of any subdomains) as the LAN address of the server. If the server itself is also used as a workstation, then its host file should define the domain and subdomains as the local loopback address 127.0.0.1.

The hosts file exists on all internet-capable computers, regardless of operating system, but its location varies. Do a search for the filename "hosts" to find it. That is all, just "hosts" -- no filetype extension. It is a plain-text file, and almost always contains examples of how to use it. If not, look for "hosts.sam" which is a common "sample" file containing examples.

Jim

[ahmedtheking]

Cool, thanks.