Help making a website available on the Internet

[Mr.Ben]

Hi Guys,

Web side I am a complete beginner - so please excuse any stupid assumptions I make.

Here is the scenario:

Windows 2k8 running XAMPP and then Wordpress

Internally, wordpress works correctly - auths to AD etc with salted and hashed passwords. (On http://myserver.mydomain.local/wordpress)

I have made a firewall change with the SWGfL to allow access to ports 80 and 443, using NAT.

Do I need to do anything else with XAMPP to make it recieve requests from - All I am seeing is connection timed out when trying to connect using http://mynatt'edip/wordpress

[PeteW]

Hi,

Are you using the internal or external IP when testing?
When in the SWGfL, does http://internal-IP-of-server/wordpress work ?
When external to the SWGfL, does http://external-IP-of-server/wordpress work ? (This is the NAT IP given to you)

You need to setup the vitrualhost file. I found this tutorial which I am sure can be adapted or point you in the right direction.

Please bare in mind that XAMPP should NOT be used for a live web server. This is from their website:
“XAMPP is not meant for production use but only for developers in a development environment. XAMPP is configured is to be as open as possible and to allow the web developer anything he/she wants. For development environments this is great but in a production environment it could be fatal.”

But you can check this link on your localhost to check the security settings - http://localhost/security/ - to harden the web server.

[jamesfed]

As said above I would never ever use XAMPP as a web host - just tooo many security related things could go wrong with it.

As you are running on 2k8 I would suggest that you use IIS instead - also are you running any kind of firewall (TMG/Smoothwall/ect)?

[Mr.Ben]

Cheers Guys,

I had missed the part about XAMPP not being for production environments - I'll correct asap and move to something else, In the meantime I've already followed the security recommendations.

Internally I can see the webserver, but http://external-IP-of-server/wordpress does not.

I've set up the virtual web hosts file to point blog.myschooldomain.com to the wordpress installation, internally this seems to work.

Should I be able to see the website on http://external-IP-of-server/wordpress if the SWGfL have configured NAT correctly?

Firewall is provided by the SWGfL, I have to put in change requests to change (as I have done). Windows Firewall is also on, allowing only Port 80 at the moment. Turning it off (for a moment) has no effect on the external connectivity.

Any suggestions on what I should build the website on?

[PeteW]

If the NAT has been setup properly, then as long as the host file has been configured to accept the IP address then your setup sounds OK. I found this on the Apache support site. Scroll down a few and it shows an example of what sounds like your setup. (2 IP addresses, one internal, one external)

If you are using a Windows enviroment, IIS7 is probably your best bet. Can take a little while getting used to the interface but by default it is well locked down security wise (previous versions were left open). Just don't deploy it on a DC or other school critical server for added security.

[Mr.Ben]

Cheers again Pete,

Spoke with the SWGfL team today and the NAT had not been set up properly.

The current setup is on it's own Virtual Machine, hosted by Hyper-V. I'll boot up a new one and transfer to IIS.

Thanks for your help, Ben