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December 13, 2007

Q: Why does http://192.168.x.x:3455 work inside our LAN but not outside??

We get this question a fair bit... people who have put ProjectForum on their computer inside their network, and other people can access it via their web browsers, using the IP address of the computer, such as 192.168.1.25 (so in their browser, they'd use "http://192.168.1.25:3455" and everything would be fine). But outside their network, this doesn't work.

What is happening here is that the IP address is only meaningful inside your local network, and cannot be accessed from outside. This is by convention... addresses starting with "192.168" (and some others, like "10.0") are reserved for use by internal networks only... so there are a huge number of machines with an IP address like 192.168.1.25, though each inside its own network.

To make ProjectForum accessible from outside, you'll need to either put it on a machine that has a public, external IP address, or configure a router, gateway or proxy machine that has such an address to route all network traffic intended for ProjectForum to your own machine inside the network (e.g. port forwarding). This way, even though your own machine only has an internal address, it will still be able to handle connections from outside. Your network administrators will have to be the ones to handle this.

Conversely, if you only want ProjectForum to be accessed by machines inside your LAN, make sure it goes onto a machine with only an internal address, and make sure that nobody has set up some kind of forwarding rule to redirect any external traffic to that machine.

There may be other issues you'll run into, most particularly firewalls that are deliberately blocking traffic between your users and the machine running ProjectForum, but as a first step you'll need to make sure you've got the right address.

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