Forum OpenACS Q&A: openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing

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1: openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing
Posted by Abhay Kulkarni on 08/27/02 06:51 AM
Hello everybody.
I installed, configured and tested openacs-3.2.5 on my RH linux-7.1
box. I run aolserver -3.4.2 from daemontools.
This is my development machine.  I have no problem in accessing my
site from port 8000 as well as from 80 from "my
mchine"(192.168.2.1). I connected to the Internet and with that
"dynamic IP address", I tried to connect to my machine from a second
machine via Internet. But the index page of my site was not seen.
Then I stopped aolserver and started httpd (apache); reloaded the
page; the other index page from apache is seen.

I set up this machine as a "dial - in server". And from another
computer I dialed to this machine, and my site using openacs and
aolserver was there. (for 80 / 8000) and using MSIE and Konquerer.

I am confused. aolserver is not accessible from any of the ports (
80 or 8000) from the "Internet." I have not set up any kind of
firewalls.

I  have arranged a demonstration of my site using openacs via
Internet to one client and I am stucked. How can I make my site
visible from the Internet using dynamic Ip address and on port 80 ?
Please help me.
Thanking you all.

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2: Response to openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 08/27/02 07:06 PM
Does your log say something like this?

[27/Aug/2002:01:00:51][11967.1024][-main-] Notice: nssock: listening on 10.0.0.20:80

I've never heard that nsd could listen on two ports simultaneously.  You may want to try just one.

Does netstat show that the ports are being listened on?

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3: Response to openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing (response to 1)
Posted by Abhay Kulkarni on 08/29/02 05:56 AM
Hi Jonathan.
My machine does say like
[28/Aug/2002:13:07:07][3885.1024][-main-] Notice: nssock: listening
on 192.168.2.1:80 where 192.168.2.1 is my machine's IP address.

I get a dynamic IP address 61.1.88.xxx from my ISP. What I want is
when anybody who knows this address, should type http://61.1.88.xxx
in his browser and could see my site.

My other site on apache on my machine is seen by this method. What
is problem with aolserver then ?

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4: Response to openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing (response to 1)
Posted by Bjorn Thor Jonsson on 08/29/02 03:32 PM
Does your AOLserver config file have this setting?:
set address [ns_info address]

You might try changing that to:
set address "61.1.88.xxx"

I'm guessing that [ns_info address] returns your machine's LAN ip 192.168.2.1 (?) rather than the internet ip 61.1.88.xxx you want AOLserver to listen to. I don't know what system setting affects what [ns_info address] returns, but fixing the setting to "61.1.88.xxx" may be fine if your ip doesn't change frequently.

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5: Response to openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 08/29/02 04:56 PM
Do you have a reverse proxy? If not how can anyone see your private internal address?
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6: Response to openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing (response to 1)
Posted by Cathy Sarisky on 08/29/02 05:06 PM
How I did it in dial-up/ISDN land:

1.  Get an account with www.dyndns.org or one of the similar free dynamic dns companies.

2.  Get a router (or dust off an older Pentium I).  There are lots of OTHER reasons to get a router also, but one is that your AOLserver doesn't have to notice when the IP changes.  (Cheap used routers may be had via your favorite online auction house.)  Tell your router to direct anything sent to port 80 (or 8000) to your web server.

3.  Don't tell AOLserver what IP to listen on, or tell it to listen on 0.0.0.0.

You could probably skip steps 1 & 2 and JUST do step 3, actually.  I'm just a big router fan, since I have 5 machines (six if you count the Audrey in the kitchen) sharing one dynamic IP.

:)

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7: Response to openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing (response to 1)
Posted by Cathy Sarisky on 08/29/02 05:09 PM
Oh, and...

You can get AOLserver to listen to two IPs (if for instance you had 20 on the machine but didn't want it to take ALL of them by grabbing 0.0.0.0) by having two sets of nssock entries.  (Call the second one nssock2 or something, but use nssock.so for both.)  I did this with a bunch of vservers when we were transitioning from one block of IP space to another.

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8: Response to openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing (response to 1)
Posted by Abhay Kulkarni on 09/02/02 05:47 AM
Hi.
As per the suggestions, I first told the AOL server to listen on
0.0.0.0. and later on 61.1.88.xxx ( the dynamic IP address I got
from my ISP ). Later I changed the SystemURL http://61.1.88.xxx in
Openacs config file. In all these cases the browser from other
computer gets connected to my site but tells that index page is not
available. The access.log file says something like

61.1.88.142 - - [31/Aug/2002:17:48:59 +0530] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302
311 "" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt)"
Does this means that an error page is sent but is not visible  (302
) ?

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9: Response to openacs/aolserver is not seen on Internet while testing (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 09/03/02 04:58 PM
302 is a redirect.  do you have ForceHostP turned on in your parameters file?