[plug] My website is back up.

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 21:19, Joong Cho wrote:

> My website is back up. Yay! But I still have one small problem to fix. I 
> also have to thank Craig Ringer for his time and effort, even though I 
> didn't take up on any of his advice. Sorry.

Grr.

BTW, if either of the domains you mentioned to me earlier is accessed
without a 'www' qualification, the Apache start page is displayed. You
might want to set up a vhost for each that just redirects to the
www.thedomain.com.

> My only other problem is that I can't access my own site from my other 
> computer, which is networked through the modem. Can anyone help me out with 
> this problem. I have to use the lan IP address to get it working.

I'm fairly certain that issue is that your DSL modem does not match
traffic from the internal network to its own external IP against its
rules for incoming external traffic, so it doesn't port forward it. You
will need to either:
	(a) Run a local DNS that gives different answers to the real DNS for
your domain, eg returns an A record for your webserver's LAN IP address,
	(b) Use a computer that _can_ do that traffic redirect on outgoing
traffic, such as a Linux box, for your router instead of the DSL modem,
	(c) Modify the hosts file on each computer to override the DNS name for
the web server (this is really the same as running your own DNS, except
simpler but uglier).
	(d) Live with it and use a different name when accessing your site from
internal hosts.

I don't know if you read the references I suggested to you in my last
message, but if not I do think you'd benefit from doing so if you want
to deal with this sort of thing.

> I went to Central TAFE to study Certificate IV in Website Development. All 
> they did in that course was to show us how to set up websites using Apache, 
> Windows 2002 server and Linux.

That seems a little short-sighted of them to me. I can entirely
understand them not teaching you the fine details of TCP/IP, the evil
hack that is NAT, etc. In other words, I'm not too surprised they didn't
cover one half of what's been giving you trouble. In general, people
co-locate webservers somewhere they can have a real IP, or they have a
network administrator taking care of the network magic (DMZs, NAT, etc)
for them.

On the other hand, failing to teach you about the DNS system seems
terribly lax - it's IMPORTANT that web site admins know what the DNS is
and how it works - how things propagate, what the record types are, etc.
I have run into webserver admins that don't know they can temporarily
lower the TTL of their DNS records a few days before an IP change to
reduce propagation delays (though I've also run into ISPs that won't let
you - WTF?!).

> They didn't really get into the nitty gritty 
> of setting up a DNS server, as I guess, it was already set-up.

Yep, it was probably assumed that the hosting provider would take care
of that, or at least the domain registrar would provide a nice web-based
interface for configuration.

There's a world of difference between setting up a website on a hosting
provider's servers and hosting a web server behind NAT on a personal DSL
connection though ;-)

--
Craig Ringer