Help me - setting up public website with Leopard Server

Is your isp providing a static ip? Are you behind a router? Is this website a business website or personal? Reason I ask about business or personal is because if your not a business customer with your isp then your isp is not going to provide or guarantee the bandwidth to handle all the traffic for your business website.

I recently started a similar project. Perhaps I can help.

I am assuming that the computer running your server software is one computer on your Airport wireless network. If this is the case, my comments would apply (I think).

1) Before setting up the server, use the Airport configuration utility to reserve the Server an IP address. The server needs to have the same IP address on your network each and every time. I had intermittent problems using Server Preferences until I did this.

2) After you decide what IP address your server will have on your network (I use 10.0.1.50) then install the server software with this IP address, and make sure the machine settings reflect manual IP address. Since it has already been reserved in the Airport Router settings, your machine will always have this available.

3) Unless you pay for a static IP address, you will get a new address periodically from your Internet Provider. I use dyndns updater (http://www.dyndns.com) to address this issue. You run an application on your server which talks to their servers, regularly updating your external IP address (the one your provider assigns you) on their server. Users type in an address you get on their site, and there requests are redirected to your current numeric IP address.

4) Without any additional settings, my Airport Extreme sends all the traffic that comes into via my external IP address to my server.

Hope this helps. Mine is a work in progress, so any comments are appreciated.

Love said:

http://sticklife.dvrdns.org


Doesn't seem to work for people outside my network.

Click to expand...

you have to setup port forwarding on your router, and on your cable/dsl modem (if the ports are blocked).

have you done/tried this?

How ...

... complex is your web-serving, anyway: Are you really in need of using Leopard Server?

I am asking this, because I use dynamic DNS together with our main machine to serve webpages/file downloads for family. For this purpose, you can use OSX all on its own. OSX Server really is needed in case you have multiple domains, complex data driven webpages, high load throughput asf. and might be overkill for your single setup.

At the momet it seems to me, that dynamic DNS is not working properly. Is the airport hardware doing the dynamic DNS setup?

Give us more details about your setup.

Just did an nslookup and got the following:

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: http://sticklife.dvrdns.org
Address: 67.215.65.132

Is that your public IP address?

If it is, enable firewall logging on your router to see what is going on.

Love said:

That's not our IP address. Close, but no cigar.

Click to expand...

you need to set dynDNS to your IP address. your external IP, not internal (so don't use 192.168.x.x, or 10.0.x.x)

and when your external changes (if you don't have a static), then you have to update it again. they have an app to do this for you

Love said:

Even when I do that, it keeps telling me the server where the page is located isn't responding although my logs seem to say that the computer I'm attempting to access it from is loading things.

Click to expand...

if you do it correctly, you will not be able to access the server using that web address locally. only from outside your network.

in other words. if you set it to test.mydns.org, and your external address is 65.65.781.32, and your internal is 192.168.1.3.

if you go to test.mydns.org on your network, it is the same as going to 65.65.781.32. you cannot do this from your network. only outside. from inside, you have to go to 192.168.1.3

i hope this helps

Love said:

twoodcc:

thank you so much - you've helped me insanely! I appreciate it so much.

Click to expand...

no problem. did you get it to work?

I guess so as if you go to the URL above, you get an OS X Server Landing Page

Chris.L said:

I guess so as if you go to the URL above, you get an OS X Server Landing Page

Click to expand...

yeah i noticed that. glad he got it to work