Can't view my own dot-com from inside my own network after ATT UVerse install
 

Hello all

I'm not sure how to search for this. Over an hour on Google has told me I'm obviously using the wrong search terms, but I'm at a loss.

I have a domain. Let's call it "myself.com". On this domain I have several subdomains, which for now all point back to the same machine as far as public DNS goes. I have subdomains for www., mail., and gallery., to name a few. Again, for now, they all point back to the same box on my network.

Since I have a dynamic public IP address, I registered with a dynamic DNS service to both register my domain names as well as handle DNS updates for my changing IP address (which for as often as it changes might as well be considered static).

With Comcast, I had it set up with NAT and specifically forwarded ports 80, 443, ... well, all the typical services ... to the same DHCP-reserved private-IP address on my box. DHCP was served from the wireless access point/router we had. It was easy to set up, especially after putting DD-WRT on it.

We recently converted to AT&T U-Verse (which sucks royal a**, by the way). I've gotten a DHCP reservation set up, and from the public Internet I can still get to all my subdomains, and I can still view my webpage.

HOWEVER, before, on Comcast, I could type in "www.myself.com" in any web browser and get my website, regardless of whether I was on my own home wireless network or anywhere else. Now, on AT&T, I can only view it if I'm on a network other than my own. If I'm on my own home wireless, I have to specifically go to the private IP address to view the site, e.g. I have to type 192.168.100.60 as opposed to www.myself.com.

Does anyone know either (a) what I should search for to find the answer or (b) the answer itself?

We have a 3800HGV-B Gateway as provided by AT&T. I don't know off the top of my head who makes it (and I'm not near it ATM).



In other words, I used to be able to connect to my web and mail servers from any other network or from my own network, by typing in www.myself.com on any web browser, regardless of which network I was on, and view my own web server I have set up. Now, I can only do that from outside networks, not from my own. I want to be able to view it on my own network too. I'm certain 100% that it's a setting in my gateway, but I'm not sure what setting that would be (if the gateway is even capable of doing that).

It's as though the AT&T device won't route a port-80 request from a device on its internal LAN to the proper privateIP:Port on the same network.

I have checked the DNS entries, and they're correct (and obviously must be if e.g. I can view the site from work or a neighbor's house or my G1 cellphone using the T-Mobile Edge network).



Thanks in advance!


CJ

In many ways, this is "above my pay grade," but since you haven't gotten any responses, I'll blather on.

First, I didn't see a description of exactly what happens when you try to access from inside the network using the external domain name. But to try to get a handle on what is going on I suggest you use a packet sniffer like tcpdump or wireshark. First thing to check, of course, is what happens with DNS. What (if any) response comes back and where is it coming from?

Also, can you satisfactorily reach other domains from inside you network?

Thank you for the response...


I hadn't considered Wireshark... usually that's one of the first things I check, and I don't know why I didn't think about that.

I can access other domains. Long story short, I have a residential setup and in all respects it works as it was intended. The only hiccup I've run into has been when trying to pull up my own dotcom from within.


I'll sniff around and see what I find... thanks for the suggestion!

Okay, so what I've seen is a DNS query (Standard query AAAA) to resolve "my.domain.com", with response pointing to my registrar's nameserver (ns3.changeip.com), and then two queries (also AAAA) for "my.domain.com.gateway.2wire.net" each followed immediately by "Standard query response, refused" and finally by a query (Standard query A) for my.domain.com followed by a response pointing to my public IP address. So, I tried connecting directly to my public IP address from behind my router and no joy.

I'm convinced the problem is in the setup of AT&T's gateway POS they put in this house. The question is where the setting is and what they call it.

You have no trouble going to other "outside" addresses (yahoo.com, etc)?

Quite possibly

Are there any numbers or markings on it you could plug into a search engine?
Any possibility a call to AT&T would help?

None whatsoever.

I've been all through it. The trouble is that they dumb things down so as to make them "understandable" for "normal" people. Trouble is, "normal" people don't screw with these things... techs do. Fortunately, I'm not so much a tech that I can't still figure things out, but what I might do with NAT or Masquerade, they might call something else, and put in a different location than all the other NAT and Masq stuff...


I called AT&T help once before. I'll save you the long winded explanation, but I will say, they were no help what so effing ever.

I was hoping there was someone here who had the same setup and was familiar with it. I think ultimately, I'm just going to have to set up internal devices (e.g., family's Outlook) to use the IP address of the private LAN, give the website URL to outsiders, and set up two accounts on devices like my phone which will sometimes be on LAN WiFi and sometimes be on public Internet.

Solved!
 

REALLY late on the thread, so hopefully this will help the Googlers out there in the future.

It's really simple, actually, and I'm ashamed I didn't think of it sooner.

In the network setup, you can set each device's name manually. I had set the name to the actual hostname of the computer serving my dotcom. What I needed to set it to was the name of the dotcom itself. E.g., instead of the hostname "Serenity", I needed to set it to "www.whatever.com".

Should have thought of it sooner.

Unfortunately, this doesn't account for subdomains (www.whatever.com, gallery.whatever.com, etc.), but it will at least get the main domain to work internally, and, if you know what you're doing, you can set up a virtual directory (I forget what Apache actually calls it) to where e.g. "www.whatever.com/gallery" will point to the same location as "gallery.whatever.com" so that use of a subdomain in the address isn't necessary and routing can still be accomplished.

Simple enough. Shoulda figured it out sooner.