Personal Web Sharing

it depends on the equipment you are using to create your lan.

 

OK, the first main thing you need to remember is that there are two kinds of IP addresses: Internal (within a company/home/organization), and external (out on the Internet). If your friends are outside of your company/home/organization (i.e., they're external), then an IP address that you use internally will not work for them UNLESS it's a valid external IP address.

For example, the machine I'm sitting at right now has an INTERNAL address of 192.168.1.101. That IP address is ONLY internal, however; it doesn't work for anyone else except me, and only within my organization. Other people may also have 192.168.1.101, but that address refers to a machine inside THEIR organization, not mine. My external address, for the sake of argument, is 17.100.200.1*; only if that address is reachable from the Internet (i.e., it's external) can someone use it to reach your machine. If I had my router configured to route incoming port 80 traffic (Web site traffic) to a machine inside my organization, then you could access my web site via 17.100.200.1.

So, the question is, where are your friends? If they're outside your organization, you will need to set up your web server and router so that the server is visible to the Internet. If you can't do this, you're out of luck.

DNS servers, BTW, are machines that translate Internet names (e.g., www.apple.com) into IP addresses (e.g., 17.1.1.1) so that programs know where to go.

Oh, and 10.x.y.z is NOT a valid Internet address, if I remember correctly. That's reserved for internal addresses ONLY. That may be why your friends can't access it.

* Not a real address, as far as I know.

 

right on clayjohanson, something I use is DynDNS. This is great cause it (along with DNSUpdater app) automatically updates to your own free sub-domain. very nice.

 

Yeah, but you still have to expose your web site... for a home system protected by a router, this would involve forwarding all port 80 traffic to the machine that contains the actual web site. THAT means opening up your machine to potential attack... I'm not sure I would do that except with a dedicated machine that I could lock down. This is one reason why there are such things as servers.

It might be a better idea to rent space from a hosting company, and then upload your web site's files to their server. That way you don't have to worry about your machine getting hacked, and you know that your web site will be up and running 100% of the time.