Newbie programmer here. I'm building an app for an API that requires an IP address for authentication. Basically, users have to send the API management their IPs and then each time a computer makes a request to their server, it verifies whether it's coming from a registered IP.
Since I work in a number of different places and thus end up with different IPs, I thought it would be easiest to use DynDNS to establish a URL that points to whatever my current IP is and then send that URL to the API management. So my first question is if this approach would in fact work?
Secondly, assuming this would work, I set up ben.dynalias.com and downloaded the DynDNS Updater client. It appears to be working: the updater says status: OK and displays my current IP. However, when I navigate to the URL (ben.dynalias.com) there's no response. Should this be the case? How can I tell if it's working?
I don't see any reason it shouldn't work as long as your updaters aren't overwriting each other by running at the same time automatically from different locations.
You can ping ben.dynalias.com and see if your current ip matches.
I just hosted ben.dynalias.com and it gave me your IP.
Since there is no web server running on that IP, then your browser will not be able to show you a page result.
You can use http://www.kloth.net/services/nslookup.php
to check and see if you get the correct IP from a host lookup.
Depending on how often your IP changes this might not be a great solution as the DNS will cache your hostname and will not try and resolve it again until the TTL expires normally minimum 1 hour.
whether the API management accepts a hostname instead of an IP address is a question only they can answer. Some will, many won't as it's "easier" to hijack a domain name than to hijack an ip address.
trying to browse to you-address.dynalias.com that points to your own public address rarely works, even if you opened up the right ports because your router will be highly confused. The best way to test such a setup is by using a phone or tablet with 3g/GPRS internet - of course after you set up port forwarding in the router to point the appropriate port to your computer.
Related
this might sound a bit amateur-ish but I'm in a bit of a situation here.
So I created myself a website and managed to get it working on localhost, I tried port forwarding ports 80,443 but nothing helped, So next thing I'm googling around and I read about ngrok and it actually worked. Got it working on a long randomly generated domain but the problem is that I want to use the one that I have from no-ip.com. How can I do that please? I'm very lost here.
Software being used: Xampp (Apache,MySQL)
I've reserved a DHCP ip-address for my PC in my router's settings, hopefully that helps? I don't know. Help me internet.
There are a whole bunch of possible reasons that this might not work. Here are a few of them.
Your ISP
Even if you have port forwarding set up properly on your router, it is still possible that you cannot do what you want.
First, many ISPs block serving websites from residential internet connections. Connections to port 80/443 will never even reach your router. You might try experimenting by forwarding a different port number (such as 8000 instead of 80) to see if the traffic can get through on that port. (However, that will not work as a practical solution since your users will not know to use an alternate port and your ISP can choose to terminate your service if you are violating the terms of your agreement.)
Second, due to the exhaustion of public IPv4 addresses, some ISPs are implementing Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT, a.k.a. Large-Scale NAT - LSN). Instead of giving your router a public IP address, they give your router a private IP address inside their network. Once again, connections to port 80/443 (or any other port for that matter) will never reach you. You can check if you are behind CGNAT by going to your router's setting and finding the public IP address, then going to https://whatsmyip.com/ and seeing if it is the same or different. (In theory, you should be able to tell that you have CGNAT if your router's IP address is between 100.64.0.0 - 100.127.255.255, but in practice some ISPs use other private network ranges too, such as 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255.)
The reason Ngrok works for you is because Ngrok opens a tunnel from your computer to their cloud servers and sends the traffic through that tunnel.
DNS
You mentioned in the comments that you have the DNS set to resolve the private IP of your computer. That certainly will not allow users on the public internet to get to your site, because they cannot connect to your address.
However, you also mentioned in the comments that if you change the DNS to point to your public IP, it doesn't work from either inside or outside. This could mean your problem is one of the ISP issues described above. It could also mean that your router does not support Hairpin-NAT (a.k.a. NAT Reflection), which is how the router would be able to redirect local traffic back to the local server instead of trying to send it out over the internet.
Firewall
Your computer's firewall can look at the source IP address of the incoming traffic, and it might be set not to allow external access to your web server. DO NOT DISABLE YOUR FIREWALL to try to get around this. Instead, you need to add a specific exception to the firewall rules to allow the incoming traffic. How you do this will depend on your operating system.
I have an apache HTTP server set up in my computer. Can I access it from anywhere over the internet? I don't have a registered domain for my server.
You can access it if you tell your router to forward your HTTP port. If your router does not know to forward it, you will only be able to access it on your local network. You do have to buy a domain, unless you just access the network-wide IP, you can find this on whatsmypi. So, to summarize, you need to do 2 things: (1) tell your router to forward the HTTP port, and (2) access it via the internet by means of your IP (unless you buy a domain name).
UPDATE
Of course this is one of those "easier said than done" and "one size does not fit all" things. There will probably be a set of difficulties that come along with your attempts to access your HTTP server. I would suggest googling some tutorials.
Strange error with an Project using dojo:
if i call : http://localhost/project everything works like expected.
if i call : http://127.0.0.1/project everything works like expected.
if i call : http://192.168.2.1/project i get the following error (ONLY in IE6!):
"Bundle not found, locale.."
Any ideas?
Iam running Zend Server CE with PHP 5.2
if i add: 192.168.2.1 to "hosts" it works (windows)
Sounds like Zend server is performing some kind of virtual site support using the site name as a partial domain.
I can't say 100% if/how it is beacuse I don't use Zend, but I can explain the principle using Apache as an Example.
There are 3 ways in which a web site can be virtually hosted under a single web server application, this applies to most servers on the market today, Apache, IIS, nginx and many others.
It all boils down to one thing, giving one running server application instance the ability to host multiple individual websites.
The 3 methods of seperating sites are as follows:
By IP address : If you have multiple IP addresses (Usually -but not always beacuse you have multiple network interface cards) then you can tell your server application to listen to one IP for one site, another IP for another site and so on. If you browse to one IP you'll get one site, and likewise the other on the other IP.
By Port Number : If your using only one IP address, then you can bind to multiple port numbers, port 80 is generally the default for web servers, but by browsing to an address and pinning the port number on the end (http://mysite.com:99) you'll force the browser to use that port. You can then have multiple websites listening on different ports and select them manually at browse time as required.
By Host Name Header: This is by far the most common way of supporting multiple sites, all web servers that understand the HTTP/1.1 protocol have to obey a header field in the request that contains the host name, when a request comes in for EG: http://mysite,com/ then there will be an entry in the request header that looks like 'Host: mysite.com' the webserver can then use that to say, oh yes.. I know which one that is.. and it then selects and serves the correct website.
The problems start to arise however when you start to use IP addresses that generally cannot be resolved or have no DNS name, because the web server then doesn't know which hostname to tag it to.
As an example in Apache, if you set up a virtual host, then try to browse that server using just the IP address, you'll get the default server, which in many cases won't even be configured to respond correctly or display anything.
To compound this, going up to web application layer, many frameworks also do their own checks on hostnames and other variables passed to them by the web server, and many make decisions on how to operate based on this information.
If you've gotten to the default web application by IP address, then there's a high chance that the framework may get confused at being presented with an IP address as a host name.
As the OP noted, in many cases, you can add a name to your hosts file and use this as a poor man's DNS substitute, the file to modify can be found in the following locations:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ - on windows
and
/etc/
on Linux/Unix
The file is generally just called 'hosts' and is a plain text file. Adding a line like:
123.456.789.123 myserver
Will tie http://myserver/ to http://123.456.789.123/
If you can, and your doing a lot of web applications it may be worth setting up your own DNS server, most Linux distros will allow you to install 'Bind' and I do also believe there is a version available for windows too.
I'm not going to go into the pro's and cons of private DNS servers here, it's a whole other subject in itself, but if your likely to be doing a lot of additions to your hosts, then in the long run you'll find it a better option.
First URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It will be very difficult to remember an IP address. Instead of remembering the IP addresses URL came like www.intrepidkarthi.com. Url normally contains three parts. For example http://intrepidkarthi.com/index.php. Here "http" refers to the protocol it uses. Then the server name and then the requested file name.
Here I have enlisted the flow of working mechanism behind your browser
The flow of work
Your browser communicates with a name server to translate the server name "www.intrepidkarthi.com" into an IP Address, which it uses to connect to the server machine. * So your browser will see if it already has the appropriate IP address cached away from previous visits to the site. If not, it will make a DNS query to your DNS server (might be your router or your ISP's DNS server). DNS stands for Domain Name Server - For exapmle if you want to get karthik's phone number then you will look into your telephone directory. Likewise your computer doesn't know intrepidkarthi.com's IP address . So it looks into DNS.
The browser then formed a connection to the server at that IP address on port 80. HTTP protocol uses port number 80
The browser sends a GET request to the server, asking for the file "http://www.google.com/karthikeyan.htm". The webserver then returns the requested page and your browser renders it to the screen.
The firewall will control connections to & from your computer. For the most part it will just be controlling who can connect to your computer and on what ports. For web browsing your firewall generally won't be doing a whole lot.
Your router essentially guides your request through the network, helping the packets get from computer to computer and potentially doing some NAT (Network Address Tranlator) to translate IP addresses along the way (so your internat LAN request can be transitioned onto the wider internet and back).
I don't know what I understood is correct or not. I need to understand it completely till the hardware level at the back.
browser has no DNS cache. your operating system's tcp stack has.
the server name in DNS may have many IP addresses. the browsers usually choose one at random.
DNS is a tree. to get www.google.com, you go to google.com name service and get IP of the computer www.
returned HTML page is a small part of the information. In turn, it points your browser to establish many connections to other servers, to bring scripts, pictures, etc.
otherwise okay.
I have a server in at a hoster (which has a static IP) and want to run a server at home too and don't want to buy the dyndns package from dyndns.com
I would either like to find a program that does this without costing money and using my own server and domain so I can have myclient.domain.com or I would like to write this myself. Would I be able to do that with a custom apache conf?
EDIT:
I have 1 Server with a static ip and I want to run a server at home (dynamic IP) I want to use the server with the static ip to run as the dyndns managing server
I use zoneedit.com for my DNS servers, and they have a free dynamic service that works fine for my home box. (On the other hand, my home box changes IP about twice a year, so it's not like I stress it.)
On my home box, I have a script that polls a tiny little cgi on my colo box to return what my current IP is (because I can't get it from the router), and if it's changed, it does a "curl" to update my zoneedit settings. When I get home, I'll try to remember to post the script.
Per your revisions: Ah, then you can theoretically do that, yes. (As noted elsewhere, apache.conf is irrelevant.) Your hosted server needs to be the nameserver of record for your dynamic DNS; you should probably use a subdomain. This would be a record in your main domain's zone file of IN NS server.ip.number.here. Then you configure a DNS server on your hosted server for the dynamic namespace; you'll have to get deep into the configuration to set up the records so that they advise client nameservers not to cache them, or to cache them only very briefly. Then you write some sort of systemry where the home machine, when a connection is established, talks to the hosted server and tells it to change the DNS for the dynamic hostname to point to its currently assigned IP.
You cannot do it with a custom Apache conf. Apache handles web serving, not DNS.
Maybe I´m wrong but I think what you want is:
create a dynamic host in a free DNS service, like dyndns.org (Or you can even manager a entire domain using editdns.com which has dynamic dns also). For example: server-at-home.dyndns.org.
Create a static IP host for the desired address (ex. www2) pointing to the same IP address of the www server.
Create a virtual host in the httpd.conf in the static ip server and put a reverseproxy using the dynamic host create on item 1.
P.S.: You said that the main goal is to void to buy for this service but i use dyndns.com and i dont pay for it. And i have 4 hosts in my account.
I have a server at home with a Static IP address, and I do exactly what you are looking to do with a free dyndns account. I just have to renew it every month or two - they send me an email and I just click the link to let them know I'm still here and alive.
I am not exactly sure, but it sounds like you want to redirect to your "server" at your house from your webserver at the hosted site?
You will need to periodically send some notification to your static IP server to let it know your dynamic ip.
You can do this is some cron/scheduled job - just create a redirect html page every day and ftp it (automagically) to your static ip host.
There are probably other ways to do this. But that should work.