I am experiencing something that I think is weird and I'm new to web servers. first i'll lay down some background information. i'm trying to host a website from my house on my cable modem, mainly for development and testing as i learn more about php, mysql, apache, etc. but also i would like to host a personal website.

ok, here's where i'm at. Server is running CentOS 4.2, Ive got apache, php, mysql, and vsftpd installed and working. first thing I did was upload phpmyadmin and properly edit the config.inc.php so that phpmyadmin is password protected. i then did yum install php-mbstring, so that i could get rid of the phpmyadmin mbstring warning.

the server is located on my local network @ 192.168.0.5, behind a router @ 192.168.0.1, and all necessary ports are forwarded to 192.168.0.5
my public ip address is 69.243.192.159
my workstation is on the same local network @ 192.168.0.6 runs openSUSE 10.0

the problem:
from my workstation...
http;//192.168.0.5/phpmyadmin works quickly and flawlessly
but http;//69.243.192.159/phpmyadmin never fully loads. the little circle at the top of firefox just spins forever.

the weird part is that http;//69.243.192.159/phpmyadmin works fine when accessed from an outside network, the only time it has problems is when i try to access it from the same local network.

this wouldnt be a problem except that i'm going to build a website with a domain that is linked to my public ip address and when i try to work on the website from my workstation I won't be able to do anything.

I don't know if my problem is apache/php related or if its a networking problem but I would really appreciate any thoughts, this is driving me crazy.

This is one of the problems with store bought basic routers. They do not have the ability to perform destnation nat operations. If you use a linux machine as a router then you can use the dnat in iptables to perform what you are trying to do. Check out this link on dnat. There are few links from Capt. Caveman. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....php?p=2125379

Brian1

so it sounds like the best thing for me to do is put another network card in my server, connect my cable modem directly to the server on eth0 and then connect my router to eth1? I'd like allow the d-link router to continue handling dhcp for the rest of my local network. i'm going to need some guidance on this. here is what i'd like to do.

WAN --> Server --> Wireless Router(DHCP) --> Various Local PC's

My Server is an old PIII 750mhz w/ 384mb RAM, CentOS 4.2, I installed from the CentOS 4.2 ServerCD and have removed cups. If there is a better suited distro that provides mysql4 and php4 then I am open to making a switch, although I am far more comfortable with red hat based distros than other ones.

dnat explanation?

crick:
that's not a problem at all, as that's how routing works.
Here's what's happening:
When you connect to the external ip from an outside machine, it hits your router as a new connection, it sees you have dnat setup, and forwards the request to the correct internal machine. All is well.

When you connect from the inside, using the external ip:
Your computer has no idea who owns that external ip, and sends it to your router. Your router says, "hey", that's addressed to me, and instead of dnat'ing the packet (since it didn't come from the outside), it just receives it on it's own port 80. However, since it's addressed to it's external ip, and since you probably don't have external management enabled on your router's web-based management site, it fails or times out.

Don't waste time fighting with this, as this is how it should be working. There's nothing wrong with your setup.