accesing my Virtual Machine from outside.

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Hi everyone hope someone can point me in the right direction with this as it has taken up the whole of last week and i cant get it working.

I have VMWare Workstation installed with a linux vm running on it. i use it as a test Apache webserver.

The virtual machine is setup with a bridged connection via my physical NIC with a static ip address.

Ive created a NO-IP account to give it a permanent name as I dont have a static external ip address on my router. so here is the setup

VM with a static IP and Bridget Connection with NO-IP configured
|
Physical PC hosting the VM
|
Virgin Media Router

If i ping the url assigned to my IP it works fine and shows that its pinging my external ip address but cannot make it point to the apache webserver.

i tried forwarding a specific port from the router to the vm but that doesnt work.

is it apache or the vm? stuck....:)

any help would be much appreciated thanks
 
You do need to forward the port, but you also need to have a router that supports NAT reflection / NAT loopback.

If your router doesn't support that, you simply need to access the VM URL on it's internal address, whilst others access it on the NO-IP name.
 
I am using the Virgin Media Hub as my main router.

I can access it from within my network fine using the internal ip address.

do you think forwarding port 80 directly to the vm will do the job? or is it the vm hardware thats stopping me?

could you drop some more details on how you got yours running Stelly and PistolPete?

thanks a lot guys
 
When you try to a connect to the VM via the NO-IP address where are you?

If you're trying it from within your own network there's a fair chance it won't work (see the post above regarding NAT loopback).
 

and No :-$

The superhub doesn't appear to support NAT loopback (from Googling)
So whilst it'll work for external people, you'll need to do it slightly differently.

You're best option is to forward port 80 for external users and use a HOSTS file entry for the NO-IP hostname and point that to your internal IP address so you can access the webserver on the same FQDN.
 
I am attempting to access it via the NOIP form a different location. Ive tried it from work and other places, its replying to pings.

are there any settings i can change on the NIC config to route specific traffic to the VM
 
well you definitely need to make sure port 80 is forwarded to the virtual machines IP address and there are no software firewalls getting in the way (unlikely as the guest is linux :p). try and give the VM a static ip address or reserve one in the DHCP scope (most home routers use DHCP by default)

even if your router can't support NAT loopback, you can still test it's working from home by using the w3c validation service on your domain. i found this invaluable as i didn't have an easy way for someone else to test it for me.

http://validator.w3.org/
 
thanks to everyone for all the suggestions, just built my new pc so will migrate my VM over to it tonight and give it another try. will post back soon :)
 
Hey guys thanks for all the help, i realized that all i had to do was just forward all the default service ports to the vm from my main router, so I forwarded 80, 21 and the rdp port and now its working great now i can ftp and rdp to it.

the only thing left now is to figure out what happens if i want to rdp to both my host and my vm :| but ill leave that for another day :)
 
the only thing left now is to figure out what happens if i want to rdp to both my host and my vm :| but ill leave that for another day :)

One rule 3389 router to 3389 host. Another rule 3390 router to 3389 VM. If that isn't possible you'll have to change the RDP listen port on the VM or host.
 
Can you not RDP into the host and then open the VM from there using the VMware tools rather than RDP?

I disabled RDP on all my VMs in HyperV and I installed the RSAT tools on my desktop and I open the HyperV manager and access the guests that way.
 
Can you not RDP into the host and then open the VM from there using the VMware tools rather than RDP?

I disabled RDP on all my VMs in HyperV and I installed the RSAT tools on my desktop and I open the HyperV manager and access the guests that way.

ive got log me in set up on the host but rdp in to the vm directly would be much easier and quicker, just thinking about future uses of my host pc and if i ever want to set up rdp on it ill have to route somehow
 
cheers marc2003 :) link bookmarked :)

and thanks to everyone else giving advice, its rare to find decent and helpful people in forums these days.

in most other places people will just laugh or ignore you completely
 
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