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In these days, even at home, almost everybody uses a router to connect to the Internet.
It is also a very handy way to handle your network, in fact, through the router you can reach the internet from
each computer on your network and connect to each other and share all your files .To do all this nice work, your router needs to be
configured. Now I will try to explain in a very simple way
how the router works . As you can see from the figure below, it's your router that connected
to the internet and when you type, for instance, www.google.com in your browser the router sends the request and
then when it gets the answer it forwards all the traffic back from the
internet to the computers on your network so basically, the builtin firewall of the router makes your computers invisible to the outside world
and that is good ,mainly for security reasons, otherwise anyone could reach your hard drive and all your files. But when you hosting a website you actually want visitors
to come and see you. To do so,you will have to open few doors on the router firewall, we'll see how further on.
The router also has a DHCP server to assign a dynamic IP address
to each computer on the LAN .It means that each time you turn on a computer and connect to the
home network, it may have
a new and different IP address.
We start changing the IP Address of the server to static because it would be quite hard to forward data to a
port which is been associated to an IP address that changes every time you connect to the router.
start/Control Panel/Network Connection
Right click on your Network connection and choose Property
you should get something like the figure below
Select Internet Protocol TCP/IP and click property
on this tab you can set your IP Address
By default this property is set to obtain IP Address automatically
but you deselect it
and click use the following IP Address.
type your Lan IP Address (not the one you've got from your ISP but the internal IP)
in the first box,we'll see how to get it later.
in the "Subnet Mask" usually you enter 255.255.255.0
in the "default gateway" you need to type your router IP Address which in this case is 192.168.2.1 (we'll see where to get it later)
check "Use the following DNS server addresses"
on "Preferred DNS server" put the address of the DNS server that your ISP gave you
and you can find it in the main page of your router settings.
You can leave "Alternate DNS server"blank unless you have an extra DNS server address
Now your server computer has a static IP address! I would recommend to let the DHCP Server to assign the IP Address to All the other computers on your network.
Configuring the Router
To help you configure your router for the ports forwarding ,I wrote the following tutorial about
the Belkin 802.11g.basically you have to open certain ports on the router
firewall,
You can have a different router but the basis on what to do are
mainly the same
on this type of router.
Assuming you have done all the initial setting to get your router connected to the internet
, now we'll see how and where we can get the IP address for the computer used as server
type the IP address of your router
in your browser address bar(in this case 192.168.2.1)then click "Lan Setting" and you get this page:
here you have >the router IP on the IP Address field
The subnet Mask
On the DHCP Server part I would recommend to enter as Starting IP an address with the last 2 digit subsequent to the last
2 digit
of the IP you choose for your server.If,for Instance,the IP is 192.168.2.5 then enter as starting IP 192.168.2.50 so there won't be any risk
of getting 2 identical IP.
To allow the router to forward the external Internet calls
to the computer where you have the web server hosting your website, type the IP address of your router
in the browser(in this case 192.168.2.1)then click Firewall/virtual Servers you get a page similar to this:
Click Add and go to the following page:
Check select a service and select Web Server(HTTP) from the dropdown
menu
on "Server IP Address" , type the IP address of your computer server that you changed to static
earlier.
on "External Port" and Internal Port you type 80 but theoretically you can use any port.
Click "Add" and your Virtual Server will be added to the ones to be forwarded of the incoming calls.
In the case you have problems and you're not able to reach your website from the internet,you can put your server computer
outside the Firewall following this way:
Click Firewall/ DMZ and you go to this page:
To put a computer in the DMZ, enter the last digit of its IP address in the field below . Click "Apply Changes" for the change to take effect.
This feature must be only temporary because the computer in the DMZ is not protected from hacker attacks
to check if the ports are opened and your server is
accessible from the internet go to
www.myserver.org
where they have a very smart tool able to sniff any opened port
on your server.
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