Turn your PC into a web server – Port Forwarding

When you are hosting a website from your machine at home, your home network needs to know where to route traffic from the outside world to the taraget machine on your network.  You probably have several machines including wireless devices connected to the home router.  This is the concept of port forwarding, the following steps will help you setup your local website to be accessed from outside via a url.

  1. Find out what your WWW External IP address <myipaddress> is and make a note of it. Click here to find out. http://www.whatsmyip.org/ Take the top number.
  2. On the machine that hosts the website, find out what the Internal IP address is of the machine. Should be something like 192.168.0.x. Follow the steps
  3. In Windows – Hold Windows Key + R | type ‘cmd’ then enter |at the prompt type ‘ipconfig’ then enter. Look where is says IPv4 Address
  4. In Linux Get a terminal session open and type Ifconfig | Where it says eth0 inet addr:

Then in your router portal you will need to make a new rule in advanced settings, look for port forwarding. Your portal should be something like http://192.168.0.1/ and the default password is blank or admin or password. Look up your router manual to find more.

If your using Virgin Media.
1. Login
2. Advanced Settings
3. Port Forwarding
4. Add Rue
5. Name 8080PC
6. Port Range 8080
7. Protocol TCP & UPD
8. IP Address – Whatever was record before 192.168.0.x

If your website is running then you should be able to access your website from outside by going to the url http://<myipaddres>:8080

port forward

Categories: Linux, Web