I'm a newbie to WCF.
I learnt that in order to address a WCF Service in my local network server, I have to set a baseAddress to the IP Address of my local server.
But what happens if my Internet Service Provider works on a Dynamic IP approach, as I understand it all IP Addresses of my local network machines can change over time, what do you suggest me to do?
Your base address is currently something in the format of: http://127.0.0.1:8734/Myservice.
You could try http://Domain.MyLocalServerName:8734/Myservice the networks DNS server should resolve the request to Domain.MyLocalServerName into the current IP address.
Link to Get a Hostname from IP Address.
Related
I have published an ASP.NET core Web API on IIS. The website is hosted on a Windows Server 2019 dedicated server with a number of IP addresses. In Plesk I have set the IP address which I want the website to be bound to (let's assume is it 10.1.1.1). When I ping the domain name I see the correct IP address.
In one of the API's endpoints, there is an HTTP Request made to an external API which has access restriction to pre-defined IP addresses. If a request is made to this external API from an unknown IP it returns an error with that IP address.
Our website's IP address is set properly at the external API. However, when our API tries to connect to the external API from code it doesn't use the website's correct IP Address. It uses the first available IP address on the server. Therefore, the connection to the external API is refused.
My question is, why the HTTP Request is not made from the same IP address as the website and what can I do to make things right?
When we bind sites to IIS, you are only binding the incoming IP address. Traditionally we would want to control and sanitize all outbound requests, it there are multiple NICs configured, the outbound traffic would be routed through the NIC that is configured with the gateway, or the NIC that is on the same subnet as the target.
If your server has multiple IP addresses defined in the same NIC, the outbound IP address from IIS hosted content is selected for you. I'm not sure if it is a round robin but I can tell you it is not in any way related to the incoming IP address that your site is bound to.
Outbound traffic is NOT associated with IIS at all, outbound traffic from IIS follows the normal pathway and rules as outbound connections from all processes on your PC/server.
The general standard to avoid this issue in IIS is to use SSL and Host Header Names. That way you can host multiple sites on the same IP address, or realy you are inbound address agnostic meaning your configuration can be easily ported to other hosts without having to mess around with multiple physical or virtual IP addresses.
Following this advice from Forcing Windows Server to Use a Specific Outgoing IP Address, you can use powershell to exclude specific IP addresses from being used as the external source.
Assuming the IP address you want to be primary is 192.168.33.129.
$primaryIP = "192.168.0.4"
Set-NetIPAddress -IPAddress $primaryIP -SkipAsSource $false
Get-NetAdapter | Get-NetIPAddress | ? { $_.IPAddress -ne $primaryIP } | % {
Set-NetIPAddress -IPAddress $_.IPAddress -SkipAsSource $true
}
Now all IP addresses, except the one you are designating as "primary," will be excluded from consideration as primary. We can verify this using...
Get-NetAdapter | Get-NetIPAddress | Select-Object IPAddress,SkipAsSource
It must also be said that communications outside of your IIS host can be routed via VPNs and Firewalls, even if you manage to fix the internal IIS server outbound IP address, the external site will still register your network's external IP address, not the internal 192.168.0.4 on the NIC.
Most enterprise firewalls will have the ability to configure Source NAT (SNAT) rules or policies, sometimes referred to as Multipath Routing, that will allow you to bypass or negate any configuration on the IIS NIC as described above.
We are trying to specify IP address instead of hostname(eg: www.abc.com) for WCF service hosted in IIS v8.0 on windows server 2012
This gives error saying special characters not allowed. Is this not allowed?
But it works fine when we specify IP address as host name in our local systems which runs IIS v7.5.
A hostname is not an IP address, therefore you can't specify it in the site bindings as a host name.
If you are trying to access a service on your local IIS machine, simply having the site binding present is enough, but you may want to bind it to a specific IP address (the IP address dropdown), or if you leave it as "All Unassigned" then the application will be available on all IPs registered with the server, on your chosen port.
If you are trying to access an app on another machine from yours, you can either get a DNS value added by your network admin, or change your HOSTS file (C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS) and add in your own alias:
54.XXX.XXX.XXX myalias
Which means you should then be able to access http://myalias:8092/ from your browser.
Update The validation message is apparently by design:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dasane/archive/2013/10/16/adding-ip-address-like-host-head-in-iis-8-shows-ui-validation-error-this-worked-fine-in-iis-7-5-and-earlier.aspx
Reading that article, I can now understand why you may want to use an IP address as a host-header, as it effectively allows you to route external IP address calls to your local machine without requirement of DNS changes. For what you need though, if the IP address is bound to an NIC on your local machine, just leave it blank as it will resolve locally anyway.
Check what you provided in Hosts file (C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc folder) in your local machine
For the above case you need to provide the hostname not ip address
i have hosted a wcf service in our office machine and which is being accessible from other pc in LAN. our office has static IP. so how can i access my wcf service from the out side of office if i know the static ip of our office.
now i am accessing the service from lan using this url http://192.168.6.2:7741/Services/CustomerService
if our office static ip is 122.160.187.236 then can i access my service just replace the ip address with static ip address ? please tell me all require steps to access wcf service over the internet. thanks
You will need to forward the port 7741 on the router to the 192.168.6.2 IP address.
You'll have to ask someone who has access to the router to do this.
Not sure what your environment is like but on your general router these settings will generally fall under 'advanced settings > NAT
Check out http://portforward.com/ for info on port forwarding.
Also, if you have a firewall, you need to ensure that traffic via port 7741 is allowed.
This is probably the quickest way to achieve what you want, but not the most secure. Establishing a VPN would be better but I'm not going to open that can of worms now.
Niel
it's not enough to know only IP of your network if you want access your machine from outside. Probably you should talk to administrator of your network to either establish virtual private network or assign external IP address to your machine. Actually the question related mostly to network administration and configuration, but not to WCF.
If you want to access your WCF Service from outside your LAN, from the internet, you need to assign a DNS Server outside on the internet that can assign to you a public static IP Address, because your LAN is most probably using a DHCP to lease a temporary static private IP Address. Some DNS server are free and other you need to pay a monthly fee.
I have a self host service in a WPF application and a client. It works fine if the client and the service are in the same LAN, so I can send messages from client to the service.
However, I would like to know how I can consume the service from internet.
I open the TCP ports for the listing port and the mex in my router in the NAT section and I have disabled my firewall of windows (I am working in a virtual windows xp).
I am trying to use net.tcp binding, is my first option, but also I am trying with wsHttpBinding and the problem is the same, I can send message in the LAN but I can't from internet.
Perhaps it's because I don't know how to configure the address in the service or in the client, or something like that.
Thanks you very much.
Daimroc.
EDIT1: if I use the www.canyouseeme.org the can access to my service. If I stop my service then i get an error. So it looks like that the service is visible. Then why can't send messages from the client?
Since you're on a LAN, it is very likely that the machine that is hosting the WCF service is not assigned an IP address accessible from the Internet. For example, if the machine has an IP address starting with 10... or 172... or 192... then that is an internally assigned IP address.
Your machine must be set up to use an IP address assigned by a registrar and optionally, assigned a domain name (e.g. canyouseeme.org) so the Internet DNS servers can translate it to the assigned IP address.
Can anyone confirm or deny that it is possible to set an IP address as a host header on IIS 6.0?
I have seen others on forums that claim to have made this work however I am having no luck with a "Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)" for reply.
I believe you can assign a website to different IP addresses, if your server has multiple addresses. However looking at our server, its assigned to the local network IP address, not the internet IP address. I don't think what your asking can happen since the IP address is not sent as part of the HTTP request. The only way I think it would work is if you have your router/firewall redirect different IP address requests to different ports on the web server, then you can bind your sites to the ports instead of the host header.