All righty guys, I am having a slight problem with Apache on my Slackware box. The problem I am having is I can view my webpage on the LAN but not the WAN. Our ISP blocks port 80 so I direct Apache on a different port. The thing about it is, is I haven't really changed anything from before I reinstalled Slack. I backed up my config files before I reinstalled and I haven't made any changes to my router. So after the reinstall, I put my old httpd.conf file back in place (and as I said my router settings never changed), restarted apache and on LAN it works but WAN it doesn't. So I am not sure what the problem is. Anyone have any ideas?

Nevermind.

All righty I thought I had but the problem itself is a little different now. Here's what is happening. I can view my webserver's homepage through my LAN AND WAN address from home...but if I try to access it from school it times out. Asked a friend to try it and it times out for him too. I can not find anything in my router's error log OR apache's error log to indicate problems. Any ideas?

Are you redirecting the connections to the port from your router to your server? And, are you sure you're not blocking that port?

It should be set right in the router. I have that port to remain opened. Would the firewall in linux block it? I couldn't see why since I can access it. Or does it involve knowing what hosts are allowed to use the server and that it is blocking public IP's? It strikes me as odd b/c before when I ran it, it worked fine. Then when I reinstalled, I had loaded my old config files back up so of anything it shouldn't have given me any problems. I don't think I did anything else to apache last time except change my port settings.

Don't know how much this helps, but here's some tidbits:

nmap is your freind. Use it on yourself to see that you have Apache at the port you think it should be ("nmap localhost" gives you a good overview of what's up on the LAN side) . Use nmap from a remote computer to see if the ports that you think are open really are (from the WAN side).

When you have a router (that uses NAT), the fact that your ISP blocks port 80 is not that big a deal. What I mean is that it doesn't mean you have to change the setup in your Slackware box. The Slackware box still has a web server, utilizing the default port 80. All that you need to do is configure your router to port forward requests to a specific port (8080 is nice) to your Slackware box's port 80. Doesn't require any tweaks to the Slackware box, though it does require that you know how to configure your router properly.

Slackware doesn't utilize a firewall by default (no rc.firewall). If you are having troubles, first thing to do is try without a firewall. This eliminates the possiblity of firewall issues.