Hello:

I used to have dial-up connection and therefore, even when it was way too slow, others could connect to my computer is I was using, let's say, Apache and just give my ip to others.

Now I have ADSL and the ISP gave me a mini modem-hub-router which uses NAT for assingning internal IP addresses to my house. Since I'm sharing the internet connection with other 4 computers, I was wondering is I could connect from outside my LAN.

I noticed there's just one IP address and that it's translated via LAN. Is there anything I can do? I'd like to host a site in one of these computers...

Thanks a lot!

One solution would be to sign up with a dynamic host site like noip.com. A client program running on your PC will update the servers with your routers IP address. You will have always have a URL that points to your router.

Then you will need to configure the webserver PC with a static IP address and the routers config for port 80 and the PC's IP address.

thanks a lot for the quick response!!!! Just one more thing,... will it allow me also other types of connections, nos just port 80 for Apache, but also like remote login, ftp, etc......

a real guru!

Just open the ports via the router. For security I do not suggest using FTP or telnet, instead use ssh.

forward the ports to the system hosting the site.

The best thing to do is to create a static NAT translation in your router (if your ISP gave you access to the Router config). A static NAT translation forwards the request to a certain internal address, i.e. 10.0.0.1. However, this is only efficient if you have a static public address on your router. If your outside address would change, you would have to change the translation. For example, if you have a cisco DSL modem/router and you wanted to forward, for example, a web request to 135.24.87.9 to an inside machine with address 172.16.52.4 you would enter the command:

at the cisco command prompt.

You will have to look up the method of doing this for your particular router.

Louie