I've got a local Apache2 server on Ubuntu 12.04
with virtual hosts, so in the 'hosts' file I pointed
the virtualhost name to the local IP address -192.168.1.33-.
So 'http://mySite.local' points to '192.168.1.33', it works fine
in the browser.
Now I want to test the same in a cellphone connected to the machine
through a wlan-adhoc network created in my notebook with shared connection.
I can see the root folder if I access to '192.168.1.33' correctly,
but not if I access to 'http://mySite.local'
I assume the '/etc/hosts' file is not affecting the traffic through the adhoc network.
is this correct? Can I change this behaviour? is possible?
You are correct to assume that the hosts file only affects connections that originate from the machine to which the host file belongs. Other traffic already needs to know the IP address it will need to connect to before it reaches your machine. Depending on how much access you have to your phone, getting it to recognize your own domain name like this maybe more work than it's worth.
I say this because you would need to do one of the following:
Edit the equivalent of the hosts file on your phone (if such a file exists in an accessible way)
OR
Set up a local DNS server to serve this info to your phone AND get your phone to use it for DNS resolution.
Without knowing what phone you have, I can't say for sure how hard either of these will be. But I would guess neither one is going to be nearly as easy as typing in the IP and bookmarking it in your phones browser.
The hosts file only works for the machine it is local on. It is not passed on or used as a data source for any DNS service. You would have to have a hosts file local to your cellphone, and I'm not sure that this is possible.
Related
I have a local network with several PCs and specialized controllers on it. These specialized controllers must be configured with static IP addresses and do not have DHCP capabilities.
I was asked to put together a list of the device hostnames and IP addresses. It's easy to figure out the IP address of each device, however, I'm struggling to find out the host name for these specialized controllers. If it were a Windows PC, I would simply navigate some menus to find the host name.
I'm confused about how the host name is configured for network devices in general. For Windows PCs, it seems like the PC itself determines its own host name. When it joins a network, it simply broadcasts its host name to a DNS server and the DNS server remembers it. For devices that are not DHCP, it seems like I would need to manually go to a DNS server and enter the host name for the specific IP address.
So what exaclty determines the host name? The device itself or a network admin?
This more of networking question and belongs to ServerFault - you will get your answer faster there.
If it were a Windows PC, I would simply navigate some menus to find
the host name.
What kind of system is there if there is no Windows? Linux, *BSD, AIX, other? I'll answer for Linux for now.
So what exactly determines the host name? The device itself or a
network admin?
This depends on your configuration in Linux check - /etc/nsswitch.conf
e.g.
hosts: files dns
Which defines that the hostname will be defined by /etc/hosts and if it is not found there it will check DNS next.
If hosts file, the local resolution, contains the pair ip <-> name it is used. If the DNS takes precedence and it contains the pair it is taken from there. As shown above, it can contain both at once in defined order, then the resolution is done in that order.
By the way, DHCP server can give you static IP addresses based on your MAC address so your controllers will have always the same IP address, if same network card is used. It is way easier to manage than configure all servers manually.
I have an Apache2 server running in Debian 9.
I am using it to host a custom MediaWiki Wiki.
To navigate to the Wiki I use something of this form "10.200.200.20/mediawiki" where the Apache2 server is running on 10.200.200.20.
This works fine however sometimes the IP Address (10.200.200.20) will change and then everyone on the local network navigating to the Wiki will have to be notified and use the new IP Address which is a hassle.
I wish to change it to something consistent, for example "OurWikiServer/mediawiki" it doesn't really matter that much as long as it can always be found at the same place.
I know this is possible as the MediaWiki installation was previously maintained by someone else who used XAMPP in Windows 7 and it was configured to be found at "stringHere/mediawiki" on the local network.
I have tried changing it in /etc/hosts and can get it changing on individual machines as expected, however have no idea how to get it working network wide.
The best way to do this is to define the IP of this station static. This can be done via reservation in DHCP server or assign IP outside of the DHCP IPs. Also consider adding small DNS server to provide hostname instead of IP
I set up my pi to broadcast it's own "wifi" and I have an Apache server running on it.
I used this tutorial https://learn.adafruit.com/setting-up-a-raspberry-pi-as-a-wifi-access-point
I can currently connect to the network that the pi is broadcasting and go to the ip of the server on my phone and it brings up the webpage, but I want to be able to type in "mydomain.net" and have it bring me to the webpage. Can anyone help me with this or suggest anything?
I want anyone that wants to connect to this local wifi (not worldwide) to be able to enter the website so changing everyone's host file is not going to happen.
you can modify /etc/hosts file on your local machine to point the custom domain name to the IP address of the environment you want to test. The /etc/hosts file contains a mapping of IP addresses to URLs.
Your browser uses entries in the /etc/hosts file to override the IP-address-to-URL mapping returned by a DNS server.
This is only useful for testing DNS (domain name system) changes and the SSL configuration before making a website live.
I have several websites set up on my local XAMPP, and have recently setup virtual hosts so that they can be accessed from my machine using dev.website1.com, dev.website2.com etc.
To achieve this I had to edit my hosts file C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts to ensure the name resolves to the correct IP address.
I would now like to make the sites accessible from other computers on the local network, but editing the hosts file for each machine manually seems to be a bad way of doing it, as it would quickly become unmanageable with several machines/addresses to keep on top of.
My question is: Is it possible to add a DNS record or similar to the domain server of our local network (SBS 2008-R2), so that machines on our network can access my websites without having to edit the hosts file on each machine?
Apologies if this is a noob question - I have tried to RTFM, but I am not a network specialist and can't really even be sure if what I'm reading is relevant to my problem, so I really need some help. Thanks.
If you want to use a made-up hostname, it either has to be in your hosts file or in DNS. It's obviously possible to add new subdomains or aliases (CNAME) that point to your existing IP/host to any DNS server -- it's would seem to be a routine operation for your DNS administrator.
After a lot of research I eventually found out how to achieve what I want. I created a new forward lookup zone with the address dev.testsite.com, and then created a blank A record and set it to the IP address I wanted it to forward to. Anyone on my network can now type dev.testsite.com to see the local apache server, or www.testsite.com to see the live version.
I'm sure there are also other ways of achieving this, but as far as I know this is the simplest.
I can point a url to a directory in my computer by setting /etc/host and /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf files. For instance, when i type sample-app.com in my computer, website under /Users/azad/works/sample-app.com folder is running.
When someone type sample-app.com in another computer in same local network i want to display the same website located on my computer. Is this possible?
By the way, i don't have access to any computer in the local network and i can't do any configuration.
Mac 10.7.5 (I am using mac but if windows is better for this purpose i can use windows too),
PHP 5.3,
Apache 2.2
If you want to accomplish this on windows, use the hosts file on the computers you want to point at that sample-app.com URL mapping your IP address to that URL in all the computers you want that to work on. Then make sure your HTTP server is configured to serve that website under that host name for port 80.
Since you aren't able to configure the local network, the best way to handle this situation is to configure a host name with the website domain's DNS server, such as dev.sample-app.com, which points to the local IP address (seeing as how its on the local network) of the computer hosting the website. This will then allow other computers on the local network to enter this host name to access the webiste.
If you had control of the local network's DNS server or control of the proxy (if they have a proxy), there would, of course, be other options.
Update:
Since you mentioned in your comment that you have control over the DNS server, here is how you could accomplish your goal via the DNS server. First, add a forward lookup zone for sample-app.com to the DNS server. Second, configure the default host for the zone to point to the computer serving up the website content. Now the client computers will resolve the local IP when the user enters sample-app.com into their web browsers. If you need to continue to have access to other hosts on sample-app.com, you might want to try asking about it on serverfault.