Forum Moderators: phranque
Jim
Sometimes the network is simple, and we might just guess. But then again, a recent poster described his LAN clients as multi-homed with two internet gateways so he could "go out on the Web" through one gateway, and "come right back into the local network" to connect to his server through the other gateway -- without having to use an external proxy to "turn the request around and send it back in" to his LAN.
So the answer depends on a lot of factors...
Jim
That's probably the problem right there. It should be impossible to access your own machine using your WAN address. This is because you're asking the router to make a connection to "the internet" going out to find a server, but that server is actually your own, and it's inside your local network. So you're asking the router to make both an outgoing connection and an incoming connection at the same time for the same HTTP request. This should be impossible.
In normal cases, people who want to test using a local server would use an external proxy to "turn the connection around" and make an incoming connection on their behest. So, you'd connect to the proxy, the proxy would make a connection back to your server, forward the original request, accept the response from your server, and then pass it back to your browser using the original proxied connection.
However, it appears that something (I don't know what, but possibly your router) is 'figuring out' the situation, and eventually falling back to some mechanism to make a loopback connection.
The usual way of avoiding having to use an external proxy is to define your domain name locally in your 'hosts' file (That's the whole filename, just 'hosts' with no extension). On WinXP it is usually located in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Add a line that reads:
127.0.0.1 <yourdomainhere>.com
and also:
127.0.0.1 www.<yourdomainhere>.com
if you also use the 'www' subdomain.
Now when you request a resource using your domain name, the hosts file provides the DNS for your browser, overriding the normal DNS system, and you should get an instant response since the request is actually looped-back inside your own PC.
If you have other PCs on your network that need to access your server, then you'll need to modify their hosts files as well, pointing your domain name to the LAN IP address of your server PC. I should add that the 'hosts' file is universal; It's location varies, but it is always named 'hosts' and is always present on all machines that can connect to the internet, no matter what operating system is used.
If you later move the site to an external host, then you'll need to delete those hosts file entries to re-enable normal DNS lookups for your domain.
Jim
I suspect that there have never been any problems accessing the server from the WAN, as long as your router is set up correctly. Test it and find out using a proxy as described above.
Jim
If you are on some non-commercial ISP service, be aware that they intentionally limit upload speeds to discourage customers putting servers onto a network that is asymmetrical by design, such as ADSL. ADSL is designed for use by clients, not servers, so it has small 'upload' speed compared to 'download' speed. When someone (a client browser) requests a page from a server on such a network, the client is 'downloading' but the server is 'uploading'.
I don't know why you'd get a different speed result between yourself using an external proxy server and someone else just browsing -- The speeds should be comparable.
Jim
