Solved Webserver cannot be accessed externally

[DextrousDave]

Hi All.

I am running a webserver with IIS, and I have setup the site binding settings as follow:

http 10.0.0.253 80

Now my hosting PC's LAN IP is 10.0.0.253. I can access my webserver from any of my PC's on the LAN via the local ip, but when I use the External WAN router IP, or my free dyndns hostname, it gets a timeout.

Note:

1. I did forward port 80 to 10.0.0.253 on the router
2. I did create inbound and outbound rules for port 80 on windows firewall
3. I disabled any other Antivirus and firewalls
4. Doing a port test on my external IP on port 80 tells me my port is open...
5. Doing nslookup on my free dyndns hostname resolves the correct IP, and I made sure my dynamic IP is updated with the hostname

As I said, accessing my web page using the internal lan address, gives me my index page, but when using either my external ip or dyndns hostname, It cannot resolve the address.

What can be the problem?

Thank you?

 

[UsernameIssues]

Check with your ISP to see if they allow web servers on non-business accounts - they might be blocking the connection.

 

[DextrousDave]

Hi. Thank you for the reply.
No my ISP is not blocking anything, since a friend of mine could access my webserver index page by visiting my free dyndns hostname. However, I cannot, so I guess my dns servers are not updated yet, since the hostname is new.
But when I visit my external IP in the browser, it does not return my server index page. Why is that?

 

[UsernameIssues]

Can you try and surf to that webpage while on that friend's network? If you still cannot connect using the external IP, then we have some more head scratching to do.

 

[DextrousDave]

No my friend is not available at the moment. In trust, I will give you the domain name mapped to my external IP address:
evolutionof4.dyndns.org currently mapped to 41.185.81.207. Are you able to visit any of those addresses?

 

[UsernameIssues]

both work fine for me
hmmm

 

[UsernameIssues]

...and both work fine via https://www.virustotal.com/url#url

I tested the links inside a VM - then thought about a url scanner as a second opinion on getting thru to your server.

 

[DextrousDave]

OK cool. Why do you think I cannot access it from within my LAN?

 

[UsernameIssues]

...but when I use the External WAN router IP...

Tell me again how you are testing this. Are you going to another location and testing? Or can you connect to a friend's router from your location?

 

[DextrousDave]

No, I am testing myself with 2 computers. The one PC is the Web Server with IIS, and the other PC is another PC on my LAN. Web Server address (local) is: 10.0.0.253 and other LAN PC is: 10.0.0.248. My friend is in the UK and is testing from there...Why do you think I cannot access the webserver by using the domain name or external IP? I can however access it using the Web server's local ip address, which is: 10.0.0.253

 

[UsernameIssues]

So - you are inside your LAN - attempting to connect to your own external IP address. I do not think that a router will let you do that... I'm not sure why, I just recall this coming up before. There may be a way to force it, but if all you need to do is test how things look/respond to others, surf back to yourself using a free proxy service.

 

[DextrousDave]

The problem is solved now. I think my DNS server was not properly updated...I see that directly entering an IP address instead of a hostname still goes through the DNS servers, due to the fact that I couldn't access my server with just the ip address (my external IP). I can now however use both hostname and external IP to visit my server from within my LAN network...

Thanks for all the help guys! Appreciate