Apache server behind university firewall

[Liquid Snake]

I'm running an Apache server and I can have it serve pages to my roommate's computer but nobody on the outside can see my pages. Sounds like a firewall to me. What can I do to get around this? A change of port maybe?

[chort]

Well, most likely you have an internal IP which is not visable for the Internet (I would be frickin amazed if your university gave each student an Internet routeable IP address). In that case, there's nothing you can do about it.

[Modorf]

first, check with the school for their policy for having personal webservers. At my school (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institure - http://www.rpi.edu) there were different policies depending on the year or even part of the year. Good place to start is the campus helpdesk, they can at least give you name, number and email of the director of IT services for your school who will give you the final word in the policy.

You might need to register or they will tell you no.
To work on ways around it, need to figure out how they are firewalling the network. They might have some ports open in the high range, they might have eveything blocked, or they might have the entire network NATed (as mentioned with the person before).

For RPI, it was a combo of having dynamic IPs and nothing open. A student could register for a static IP which openned port 80.

Hope that helps.
Nathan.

[Liquid Snake]

Oh yes, I do have a very real IP address. The domain is named after my dorm and room number. I can use it for telnet but not apache.

[chort]

Yikes, OK a few things here.

1.) Do you know the difference between an Internet IP and an RFC1918 address? It seems like you do, but in case you're not familiar you can review internal (not reachable from the Internet) addresses HERE (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1918.html)

2.) You say the domain is named after your dorm room. The domain name which may be assigned by the campus really doesn't have much to do with it, what you need is the IP address. Can you connect to your dorm computer from outside on the Internet, say at your parent's house? If so, you need that IP address (do nslookup your.dorm.domain.edu to get the IP address).

3.) You use TELNET to access your computer??? Holy security breach, Batman! Shut off inetd immediately and learn to setup SSH. You do know that all data passed over telnet is easily readable by anyone else, right? Anyone on campus can know your root password and take over your box.

4.) If you do have an Internet-routable IP address and you cannot get to your server on port 80 of that IP address, then you need outside port redirection. I think a few of the dynamic DNS providers have this. Basically you register a domain name with them and redirect it to your IP address, but on port 81 or port 1080 or something like that so that it can get past the firewall. Before you set that up, try changing your Apache to bind to different ports and then test it from the Internet to see if it works. Once you figure out which ports the firewall is not blocking (most likely it blocks anything under 1024) then you can setup redirection. I think dyndns.org offers this service.

Now go disable telnet and setup ssh!

[BMK1st]

Maybe you should try port 8080 or 8000. Some schools and ISPs usually block port 80. Try to make changes in your httpd.conf and open your page with your address like this. http://myaddress.edu:8080

BTW, what school do you go to? Lancaster isn't far from where I live. ;)