Hello,

I'm using a linux machine (Fedora 19, but shouldn't matter that much) that serves pages through different ports than the default (for security and admin purposes, as I understand it). Can't change that, but see my end note below.

I have installed a Debian on a virtual machine (VirtualBox) that will suffice some needs I have that would be much harder to do in the used Fedora setup (and I can't change it easily, if at all possible).

Now I have the following problem: I have to setup this virtual environment to direct everything that comes to my machine through port 9982 (for example) to my virtual Debian port (which I can freely setup if needed, but I don't know how).

Further, if my Debian would use other ports for common sites (e.g.: PHP+SQL), I would have other port numbers to configure in this "pipe".

Note: I can't change most things in my Fedora setup, but I can make unused ports the "site ports" for my virtual machine. Id est, when I access http://localhost:9987/ in my host (or any machine that has access to it), I'll be accessing my Debian websites.

Normally I could use a virtual machine with network brige (so just a local lan would exist, in practice). But with these different details I'm not sure what's the best to do, or my options.

What do you suggest? And please detail the steps I must do.

Thank you

Just a small note: my host machine has a fixed IP and can be visible to others using its hostname. So, dynamic IPs or network setup problems should not exist.

Ok, confusing.

A vm for the most part is a real computer. When one uses NAT for the client then a virtual router exists between the client and host. When one uses bridged then the host is more directly connected. All that shouldn't matter really. For example if your client is set to nat and it's ip is 10.10.10.10 and used port 801 for http then any traffic to that host would have to be sent as 10.10.10.10:801

The external router may be set to PAT (Port translation). Some can have public ip and dns for mysite.com translated to internal private ip:801 for example.

1 members found this post helpful.

I got to agree, but on the router look at the difference between IP forwarding and Port Forwarding. With IP forwarding you are hosting one single server across the IP. With port forwarding you can forward different ports to different IP addresses. However there is one possible issue with Port Forwarding verse IP Forwarding. Streaming data hosting such as voice or video is often degraded when Port Forward is used. That all depends on the quality of router, how fast it can analyze the packets to get the port info verses the amount of traffic being passed.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you both for these comments. Audio and video streaming are not considered in my setup. But I'm still not sure what to do.

Is there any other detail I can give, so it is more clear?

Quickly, it is something like:

1- computers in room, local network (although each has real IP, they're behind firewall/configs we cannot change)

2- one mandatory configuration is that web (even locally) is not served through 80 or 8080, but through another known port

3- in the machine I use, I have set up a virtual Debian 8

4- now I want to make the virtual Debian accessible to the other local computers (dealing with the network setup of my machine, of course)

5- to have another port to access the Debian web, so it does conflict with my machine "normal" web serving is desired as an extra. This can be configured in my machine (the extra port traffic, for my service (lets call it a service).

Set up the VM with a NAT adapter and add a port forwarding rule in the host to push incoming connections on a port of your choosing to the VM.

If you want incoming connections to the host on port 9982 to be redirected to the VM, then add a port forwarding rule in VirtualBox to push connections on port 9982 to the VM. It doesn't get any more complicated than that.

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=55766
http://www.howtogeek.com/122641/how-...t-as-a-server/

1 members found this post helpful.

Are you saying that the web server is on local lan?

Just to overstate the obvious for web applications, this is why they have the vhost function of Apache. Only one web server is needed for multiple hosts.