Tough Question to stump

[paulboy]

I have a static IP dsl service from directv. I purchased a router to share an internet connection. I have a OSX server running that is connected to the router. Now the tough question. If i bought a domain, and i want the domain to point to my X server that is connected to the Router, how can i do that? Will the IP address on my OSX machine assigned by the router (which seems static) be the one i give the domain service to point to my computer or is it the Static IP which came with directv?

Thanjks in advance

Paul

 

[kenny]

Actually, it may be neither, but I'm assuming that you've got your own DNS server, so the IP address assigned to the ROUTER (on the external interface) should be the one given to the registrar. The address that your Mac gets from the router is probably something like 192.168.x.x. The only reason it seems static is that if you only have a single machine (or you never turn the machines off), it'll just get the same address when DHCP renews.

Also, you'll need to configure the router to redirect traffic for the DNS server on the local network (TCP/UDP port 53).

On the other hand, if you're using someone else's DNS server for your domain (dyndns.org, for example), you'd give the domain registrar the address of that DNS server.

Hope this helps...

 

[alexrd]

The answer to this question really depends on your router: Some can do this and some can't. How it is done will, again, depend on the router. The only home router I have direct experience with is the LinkSYS. In their vocabulary you have to set up a "DMZ" machine. Basically, all outside requests (HTTP, SMTP, whatever...) will be directed to a certain host on the internal network.

More sophisticated routers will let you pass different protocols to different internal hosts (ie: mail to the one machine, HTTP requests to another).

What your router company calls this facility may vary, I've seen it called service mapping, tunneling (which is confusing), DMZ host and probably a dozen other things.... Hopefully your docs will be clear.

BTW, all of this is a seperate issue from the DNS service discussed in the previous post. First you need to get outside traffic to your machine, then worry about what services to run (DNS being one of those services...)

Hope this helps....

-alex.

 

[kenny]

Originally posted by alexrd
The answer to this question really depends on your router: Some can do this and some can't. How it is done will, again, depend on the router. The only home router I have direct experience with is the LinkSYS. In their vocabulary you have to set up a "DMZ" machine. Basically, all outside requests (HTTP, SMTP, whatever...) will be directed to a certain host on the internal network.

More sophisticated routers will let you pass different protocols to different internal hosts (ie: mail to the one machine, HTTP requests to another).

Actually, this is not entirely correct. In fact, if you use the "DMZ Host" functionality this way, it can be somewhat dangerous.

The Linksys router is capable of port forwarding (see forwarding under the advanced tab on the Linksys config page) to different hosts based on the port, so it can serve as that "more sophisticated router" mentioned.

I've done this quite a lot in the past, sending SSH traffic to one host, web traffic to another, and so on. The DMZ Host is the "everything else" machine. If, for instance, I have port 80 traffic forwarded to 192.168.1.2, and the DMZ host designated as 192.168.1.60, all traffic except port 80 will be sent to 1.60. If no forwarding ports are specified, then all traffic will be sent to the DMZ host, as you say.

This can be dangerous because if the DMZ host is not properly locked down, it is effectively connected directly to the internet, which kind of defeats the part of the purpose of having the Linksys box in the first place.

The DMZ host setting can serve as a simple workaround for the "tricky" protocols that some apps (especially games) use. For instance, it came in very handy when running an Unreal Tournament server, since it requires something like seven different ports to be open to properly function. But for general use (web, smtp, dns, etc), port forwarding is far safer.

 

[paulboy]

I actually have a Netgear dsl router and this has the "DMZ" feauture aka port forwarding. i have set the port 80 (start and end) to my local IP assigned by the router, For some reason though, when i get on another computer and type in my Static IP (WAN IP), it opens up my router web based configurater. Since I have my computer (10.1 server) and want it to act as my webserver, this kinda defeats the purpose. When i type in the Static IP provided by my dsl ISP, i want it to point directly to my X Server and serve pages from it. ANy ideas? Did i set the port forwarding incorrectly? I put in 80 (start and end) and put in my local IP of the computer.