Is it possible for me to run a webserver on my computer (shared ip) and access it remotely using my ip + subnet or at least some way that doesn't involve having the IT guys make changes to the machine(s) currently running our virtual servers and/or routing our subnet?
Rationale:
I'm on a computer at work, and I'm making changes to a plugin for Google Website Optimizer. I want GWO to be able to access localhost (i.e. my development environment) so that I don't have to deploy every change to the production server while I'm feeling out the system. (lots of changes; tedious deployment takes up most of the time)
I can't just supply my IP to GWO because that points to our production server (all of our computers at work are on the same IP). If I could construct a URI that points just to my computer, then I suppose I could let GWO view a page on my development environment and interact therewith.
Not only would achieving this purpose be helpful in present circumstances, but it would aid me immensely in that I could let my boss look at what I've got in dev, from his own machine, at his leisure, without deploying changes to production.
I'm not familiar with the Google Website Optimizer, or how/where a plugin for it that you might write would be executed. So I'm going to summarize what I understand about your problem (including some guesses) and go from there, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Your company has one public IP address.
Your workstation and all the hosts on your network are source NAT'ed to the internet.
Port 80 (http) on your public IP address is destination NAT'ed to your production webserver which is hosted as a virtual machine.
You have a development webserver that is hosted on your workstation.
You have reservations about involving your "IT guys" to making routing or system admin changes.
You want your development environment to be accessible from the internet.
First up (assuming everything above is correct):
access it remotely using my ip + subnet - No. Not possible.
Second up:
I could let my boss look at what I've got in dev - Easy, get him to point his browser at your workstation's IP address on your internal network.
Possible solutions for remotely accessible:
Talk to your "IT guys" about getting your dev environment made externally accessible.
Use name-based virtual hosts on your production webserver. Requires setting up a DNS record for the dev site (e.g. dev.your-company) and pointing it to your company's IP address. If SSL is in use this is harder to achieve. You could then:
Proxy requests for a different site name to your workstation (readily achievable with apache).. or
Host your development environment on your production server
Proxy a particular URL path to your workstation. (e.g. /dev/)
Get an unused port (e.g. 8080) on your public IP destination NAT'ed to port 80 on your workstation. Your dev environment URL might then be http://www.your-company:8080/
Related
Over the years, I used No-IP to link a domain to my IP address, and then used No-IP's DUC (Dynamic Update Client) to update my IP, so that the domain will always point to my IP.
That's very handy for running dedicated game servers.
Is there a DUC-equivalent for Google Cloud DNS?
In essence - No - there isn't :(
Unless yo're using Google Domains for your domain hosting then yes - they support just the thing.
Cloud DNS doesn't have that functionality. There are several workarounds like reserving a public IP for your VM which in my opinion would be the best way to do it. Unless your VM get's deployed using Deployment Manager then it may require some more scripting.
Similar questions have been raised on Stackoverflow here and here which you might find helpful.
If you're running Linux here you'll find a complete script how to update DNS records after a machine startup.
How can i host a website through my computer using server softwares?
I tried to host a website through my own computer using apache tomcat server but it didnt work ( please briefly explain every point )
The main issue that you need to deal with is getting the clients to your computer.
Yes, it is possible and yes I have done it, albeit a while ago.
You need to see if you can browse to your computers website from another device on your network, this will ensure that apache is working. Try another computer/laptop/tablet/whatever to see if this site reachable by other computers using the IP Address and possibly port number. If you cannot get to the site, there are settings in apache to deny certain ip's, google it to get the exact steps for your version. If it works, move on to step 2.
You will need a static IP Address to ensure that all further steps stay working, google this if you are not sure how to do it
You need to have the external IP address of your router(whatsmyip.org) or use Dynamic DNS to route traffic from an address to your ip and there are services that allow this. I can recommend no-ip.com - This is all assuming that you have access to the router.
You would be required to set up port forwarding on your router. This will direct the internet traffic to your computer. You will need to get the exact instructions for your specific model of router.
Please be aware that you need to have proper firewalls and systems in place to prevent attacks. I am sure that you are just testing at this point though...
All the best!
Sorry if I have this in the wrong community but I'm hoping one of you can help me out anyway.
I have a web hosting account with a UK company who I'm happy with, but I'd like to set up a little hosting account from my laptop, just to see if it's possible and easy enough to do really.
Trouble is I've been doing a lot of research online but coming up empty whenit comes to more of a "complete guide". Do any of you know of a good resource for setting up a home server for publishing "Live" websites with custom TLD domain names? I have a localhost server running and files hosted on there but I'm really looking for help with the IP and DNS parts for the custom domains.
For reference, I have a machine running Win7, Appserv 2.5.10, UK broadband and a .co.uk domain name registered with 123-reg.
Any help would be hugely appreciated.
You'll need to:
Point your domain to your laptop.
If you get static public IP address from your ISP, then you can just point the A record to this IP address.
Where do I set this A record? Almost all domain registrars give you a nameserver for free. You point your domain to their nameservers (generally ns1.somedomain.com and ns2.samedomain.com etc.). In the nameserver config, create a A (stands for authoritative) record and put in your static IP address.
What if my ISP doesn't give me an static IP address? This is where services like dyndns come into picture. They give you an agent that you'll install on your laptop, it detects the change in IP address and automatically updates the Nameservers accordingly. There are some free variants of dyndns as well if you don't want to spend money on this.
But my laptops IP address is something like 192.168.x.x and my site runs on localhost (127.0.0.1)? Your laptop is most likely NATed. Think about your public IP address to be that of your router. You will need to forward any connection coming to your router on port 80 or 443 to your laptop's (192.168.x.x) corresponding ports. This is called Port-Forwarding and all routers support this. Port-Forwarding is done by logging on to the admin interface of your router (Many times its at http://192.168.0.1 or http://192.168.1.1).
But again my application is accessible at localhost? You need to make sure your apache/nginx listens on 0.0.0.0 or atleast 192.168.x.x interface. This is how computers outside your laptop will be able to make connection to your laptop on port 80/443.
I have a domain controller set up in an Azure VM, and a couple of other servers also set up as VMs. When I set up the server VMs, I configured DNS and WINS to point to the IP address of the DC and joined them to the domain. However, these settings don't survive a shutdown (where the VM is deallocated). When the VM is started back up, DNS and WINS are empty, and domain authentication does not work.
I read that I should provision new VMs via PowerShell commandlets, specifically setting up domain joining. I tried that, and maybe I got something wrong, but it didn't work -- the newly provisioned VM was not joined to the domain, and did not have DNS/WINS set to point to the domain controller.
In any event, my question is: is there any way to re-configure an existing VM to retain network settings through a shutdown or is my only option to figure out how to provision a brand new VM to be married to the domain controller, and then to start from scratch?
Thanks!
You shall never use static configuration on your Azure VM! Neither for IP Addresses, nor for DNS Settings. What I recommend to use is a long story you can read here. It is tested, validated and proven to be effective. A short extract follows:
You should setup at least two sub-nets. Leave one solely for the DNS (and AD/DC if it happens to be the same server). Put all rest of the machines in the other Sub-Net. Thus, you will have 100% predictable IP Address of the DNS Server machine. Having that in mind, configure the DNS for the virtual network via the portal or via PowerShell. But explicitly configure DNS Server for that virtual network. Set IP address for the DNS - the one that you know it will have!
Please do never forget - never manually change network configuration settings for an Azure VM! Doing so is a path to failure.
The above method will help you resolve DNS issue. Now, for the WINS. I don't think you can configure WINS via Virtual Network settings. So, if your VM really loses WINS config, you can create a small powershell script that runs locally on each VM to configure WINS settings upon boot. You can either make this script more generic by looking up the DHCP assigned DNS server and use the same IP Address for WINS, or just put it static, because you know what the IP Address of DNS server will be.
Anton presents a clever and perfectly workable solution, but I wanted to understand what exactly I was doing wrong, because Microsoft guidance suggests that it should be perfectly possible to set up and maintain an Active Directory domain the in the Azure cloud without putting the DC into its own subnet.
After a lot of trial and error (mostly error), I finally figure it out. This is not well documented, so hopefully this will help someone:
In Windows Azure, cloud service is another term for application, or a set of components that scale together. A cloud service is assigned a single DNS name and a single external IP address. In the context of virtual machines, you typically have a 1:1 correspondence between a cloud service and a virtual machine. You only add additional virtual machines to an existing cloud service when you want Azure to automatically load balance and distribute requests among the VMs inside that cloud service, treating them as if they were one.
This brings me to my mistake. Not fully understanding the above, I was attempting to add a new worker virtual machine to the cloud service in which I set up my Domain Controller. That is not a supported configuration. Once I understood that, and properly configured a new VM into its own cloud service, associated with the domain controller as DNS server, everything worked perfectly.
I have a development server (Java servlet container) running on my computer inside my private network (IP range 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255). This development server executes my integration testing environment. This testing environment has its own Facebook App ID. Having the server run in the 192.168.x.y range allows my colleagues to test the website, login to my local website with their Facebook accounts etc..
At https://developers.facebook.com -> in the Facebook Apps settings -> located under "Basic settings" -> in the "Website with Facebook Login" field, I have set http://192.168.2.106:8080, as this is the address-port combination that my development server binds to.
Due to DHCP, my computer now has a slightly different IP address, namely 192.168.2.109. Whenever I start up my server and then try to do anything Facebook-API related (e.g. Facebook Login), I get the following error message from Facebook
{
"error": {
"message": "Invalid redirect_uri: Given URL is not allowed by the Application configuration.",
"type": "OAuthException",
"code": 191
}
}
Is there a way to have a Facebook App allow a "range of IP address websites with Facebook Login"? What other solutions can you suggest?
My colleagues shall be able to also start up the development server on their own machines, with their own private network addresses. Therefore, the same Facebook App ID shall work on different machines with different IP addresses and still be accessible to everybody inside the private network.
Notice that setting "Website with Facebook Login" to localhost makes the development server only available to the same machine it is running on. This unfortunately prevents colleagues from accessing this development server instance.
Update
Filed bug: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/606277079382609
If you could get away of using localhost, then there is a very simple way:
Make the facebook app redirect to http://lvh.me:3000/ (or whatever port your server is listening on localhost). A benevolent developer owns the lvh.me domain and had the DNS setup to point to localhost. I've tried this and that's what I used for development testing.
Similarly, you could do stuff like that and points a DNS record of a domain you own to a range of local ip. I am not familiar with DNS so I am not sure how to set it up or if it's possible.
If you're running on Windows you could try changing your hosts file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
and add your IP to an imaginary domain (your colleagues should do it too) and put that domain in Facebook Settings panel.
I'm not sure about this so tell me if it works :)
As far as i know you cannot setup an IP range in your application setting, the redirect_uri is typically meant to handle urls with domain names, which is usually the case with with public websites.
The best way to avoid this problem is to make sure you local development server has always gets the same IP, which is generally a good practice if you are writing a server.
there are several ways to do it depending on the network setup, here are two option:
Setup your DHCP server to always assign the same IP to your dev server MAC address
Bend the rules a little bit and setup your computer to claim an unused IP address. DHCP servers typically assign IPs in order (will start from 192.168.1.1 and work up to 192.168.254.254) so have your computer claim an IP in the higher part of the range (Ping the IP first to make sure it's not being used)
Instead of using an IP address, use localhost.
So hxxp://192.168.1.20 would become hxxp://localhost
(replace xx with tt)
This resolves back to the local machine, whatever its IP address is. I am assuming that your development server is running on your PC, using WAMP or something similar. I draw this assumption because you state that it must run on any laptop in any network environment.
If you own a domain you could create a subdomain test.mydomain.com pointing to 192.168.2.109.
When your address should change again, you can change the entry accordingly.
There is no reason why a DNS entry could not point to a IP address from the 192.168 range. For someone outside your network it will not be of much use, because he can't access your IP address from the outside, but for your co-workers within the network it will work.
If a coworker wants to run the web app on his own PC, he can of course override this setting using his own hosts file.