Welcome to Xerver Help Online!
I have a router. Can I use Xerver?
This is actually not a web server issue, but a network issue.
You must configure your router to forward the incoming connections
to your server computer.
However, how you do this depends on how your network is built up.
An excellent website that will describe this in great detail is:
http://www.dslwebserver.com/main/router.html
Hopefully, after reading the website above you should know:
- The difference between a local IP (your Local Area Network IP (LAN))
and your outer IP (your Wide Area Network IP (WAN))
- The difference between having static internal (LAN) IP addresses
and having dynamic internal (LAN) IP addresses.
Also, you must understand that your server computer (the one
running Xerver) must have a static internal (LAN) IP address.
- You must understand that you should configure the router to redirect
connections from a certain port (in your case port 80 as you want to
use a web server) to the server computer using the server computers
internal (LAN) IP address.
Hopefully you shall now be able to configure your network so
that you can run Xerver on a server computer even if it's behind a router.
How do I configure my router?
How you configure your router depends on what router you have, but with most
routers you can find your router's setup page by visiting:
http://192.168.0.1/
If you don't have a router the above link will most likely not work for you.
If you are not sure how to enable port forwarding on your router,
an excellent website that shows how you can configure your router is:
http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm
You will tell the website what router you have (brand and model) and it
will show you step by step screen shots of how you can enable port forwarding
with your particular router.
Visit the above address to configure your router so that it forwards a certain port
(any port of your choice) to that port on your computer that you have told
Xerver to listen to.
Example:
Let us say that you want to use both
Xerver Web Server and Xerver FTP Server. You want to run these servers
on your computer on port 5080 for the web server and 4321 for the FTP server.
However, you want that your users shall not use these ports, but instead
you want them to use the default ports (which for a web server is 80 and
for a FTP server is 21). Now you must configure your router so that it
forwards all incoming connections at port 80 to 5080 and all incoming
connections at port 21 to port 4321 to your server computer (the one running Xerver).
Your users won't know that you run the servers on port 5080 and 4321,
since they will use port 80 and 21 on the router and this is what they see.
Remember that when you configure your router you must tell it to which computer
the incoming connections shall be redirected to (since you might have several different
computers behind your router and it needs to know which of these computers shall
get the incoming connections (which is the computer that runs Xerver)).
Example:
You might have 2 computers and 1 router. Your router's (outer) IP that it gets from
your ISP might for example be 66.249.64.256 (this is actually a made up dummy IP
that no one has). Its (local) IP might be
http://192.168.0.1/
(where you can visit the router to change its settings).
Your two computers might have these (local) IP addresses:
192.168.0.2 and 192.168.0.3 (you can easily find out your computers
local IP addresses).
Let us assume that you want 192.168.0.2 to be the server computer which runs
Xerver. 192.168.0.3 might be any other computer you have at home.
Let us say, as in the previous example, that you want redirect port 80 to 5080
and port 21 to 4321.
Now you must tell the router to redirect
all incoming connections from port 80 to port 5080 at computer 192.168.0.2 and
all incoming connections from port 21 to port 4321 at computer 192.168.0.2.
How this can be done varies in different routers, but most routers have this
under a menu called "virtual servers", "port forwarding", "port mapping",
"port redirecting" or something similar.
Your users will not know anything about your computers 192.168.0.2
and 192.168.0.3. Neither do they know about that you run Xerver on
port 5080 respectively 4321. As far as your users are concerned
you might as well have one computer with the IP 66.249.64.256
that listens to port 80 and 21, which are the ports they use
and know about.
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