I have built a d3.js dashboard that ties into a tornado websocket. Everything works perfectly locally. I now would like to have the ability to share the websocket with a few friends, nothing production. Is there a way to do this without a big deployment on Heroku or other similar service? I've googled and can't seem to find an answer. Thanks
Not specific to Tornado. This is more of a networking question.
What you want to do is:
Run your server on your computer.
Connect to the internet.
Note down your public IP address.
Give your IP address to your friends.
Certain things you need to take care of:
Run your server on a higher, non-standard port (e.g. 8000 would be good) because ISPs block traffic to port 80 and other standard ports.
The IP address assigned to you by your ISP will most probably be dynamic. That mean, every time you diconnect and reconnect to the internet, your IP address will change.
Turn off your computer's firewall to let in the traffic at whichever port your server is running.
Finally, you'll need to configure port forwarding on your router. What that means is all the incoming HTTP requests will arrive at your router at your public IP address. But your computer where you'll be running your server will have an internal IP address assigned by your router. So, you'll need to forward incoming requests to your computer's internal IP.
Related
Well I'm running ssh server on my laptop which I'm portforwarding to my router and I assume that I can now connect through my routers ipv4 and port in order to tunnel back to my laptop but it doesn't work like that does it.
Can someone explain to me what I need to do in order to make this work. Simply please I don't want to get confused and I know this is a noob question but I went straight to other things instead of learning some basics and now I'm feeling the consequences lol.
Depends from where do you want to access your laptop. If it's just from your local network or LAN, you don't need to setup anything on the router. If, however, you want to access it from the internet, you need to setup port forwarding on the router, but probably also set it up with your ISP.
SSH server setup
SSH server normally runs on port 22 (SSH port). At first your laptop's firewall blocks all incoming traffic! So in order allow people to access your laptop through SSH, you need to tell your firewall to allow incoming traffic on port 22. Also, if you haven't already, set a static IP on your laptop so that you can configure the router for port forwarding and access your laptop easily. And make sure to exclude the static address from the DHCP range (so that your router doesn't your static IP to another device).
LAN connection
In case of SSH connection only on your local network, all you need is the local IP of your laptop. That's it.
WAN connection (internet)
So first, of course, you need to enable port forwarding on your router and specify the port 22 and your laptop's local IP address. But you need to know how are you connected to the internet. Because, ISP's can have an intermediate layer (or layers) network. And this network eventhough is way bigger than you home network is still a private network, and uses private IP addresses. So in order to access your laptop through the internet, you have to talk to your ISP. And the final public IP is the one you would need to access the SSH server.
I am a novice at networking, I have a NodeJS server running with server.listen(3000, '10.0.0.7'); and have forwarded port 3000 with the internal IP address of my server being 10.0.0.7. I can connect from another machine on my network by putting in the browser: 10.0.0.7:3000. It is my understanding that my external IP address should connect me to the router which should then forward me to the server I have set up on 3000.
Am I missing something important? Because I am unable to connect via the external IP address.
Also please note that my firewall is disabled.
I am neither a network expert so excuse me if I use any incorrect terms. In my understanding, you are right about the current configuration, however you are missing the last step. By default, your router makes your LAN unreachable from a so called “external ip”. Just for the definition: external ip in this case is every ip that is not in your LAN. Imagine if your router would allow any communication without you explicitly giving permission. Every open port on your LAN would be available for the network that your router connects to. That is definitely not desirable.
Lets look at it with an example, quoted from this article:
your router has an ip of: 5.6.7.8 if you access it from outer network (internet)
your router has an ip of: 192.168.1.1 if you access it from your LAN
your laptop is in your LAN and has an ip address of 192.168.1.10 and you want to expose port 3000 from your laptop to the outer network (internet)
You have 2 options:
You can expose the port via the configuration of the router (e.g.: you map 5.6.7.8:3000 to 192.168.1.10:3000 in the router configuration and now it will be accessible from the outer network on 5.6.7.8:3000. Note that you can choose any free port, ports don’t have to match.). Of course it is only possible if you have the option to configure the router and you are willing to do so. (e.g.: if you are not in a café)
You can use some tunneling tools like Ngrok or OpenSSH, which make a direct tunnel between the external machine and your server. This can also work if you don’t have the ability to change the router configuration.
Hope I was able to help. Good luck.
I am working on IOT project in which I have to change some variables(fans speed, lights, etc). So just as a starter, I created a node.js server and tried to send requests to the server through a local network using local IP as
http://localhost:7000/users=mandar?lights=OFF
or
http://192.168.43.248:7000/users=mandar?lights=OFF
and it works fine.
Now I want to do the same over the internet. So I got Computer's IP address from https://www.google.co.in/search?q=myip and tried to send a request to the following URL:
http://(IP_address):7000/users=mandar?lights=OFF
This time it keeps on loading and finally shows this site can't be loaded.
So what is the right way to connect to the server through the internet?
Thank you.
You have to do port forwarding.
The IP address you get from the google search is the out-facing IP address of your router. However, your router knows your computer by your local IP address (i.e. 192.168.x.y).
You have to configure your router to send packets coming from internet destined to port 7000(or any other port) to your computer's port 7000.
Check your router's documentation on port forwarding. Likely there is a settings page on the web interface of your router that you can do the desired port forwarding. After configuring the router, there are several tools online to test if the port forwarding is actually working. I suggest you use one of those tools to verify the configuration before testing with your project.
You also might want to check if your router has a firewall. You can add an exception to the firewall such that a specific port number is reachable from the internet.
I am trying to run a server on a different host to my website. How can I set it up so that if people connect to certain ports on my domain that they connect to my server, and so my website still works.
Ports exist on the level of TCP and UDP. There is nothing DNS can do to magically change what happens, at the client or your server, on that level.
For your web site, DNS provides translation of its name to a set of IP addresses. The client's browser will then try to talk to port 80 or 443 on one of those addresses. If you want the other server to use the same name as the web site, it must answer requests on other ports on the same set of IP addresses.
If your server is for a protocol that's new and smart enough to use SRV records, you can use that to actually run the server wherever is convenient but still tell the users to connect to the web server name. Check the documentation for details.
If you can't do that, another possibility is to run a small process on the web server machine that listens to the other server's port(s) and forwards all traffic to wherever the server is actually running. The feasibility and details of doing so depends a whole lot of what server it actually is, so I can't really say any more about that.
Or you could just tell the users to use www.tellusthesoddingname.com for the web site and server.tellusthesoddingname.com for the server and point those names at different IP addresses. Which is by far the simplest and most robust solution.
I am trying to get my Node.js server to listen to a public IP so that I can access it on a different network than my home network.
I've purchased a domain and used a DNS host - right now I'm using No-IP and have downloaded their client to push my IP to their servers.
When I set the IP on No-IP configuration to my local IP I can use the domain name and hit my server on another computer on my network. But if I change this to my public IP and use the domain, the request hangs for about 10 seconds and then fails. I've set up port forwarding (I believe correctly) and opened inbound / outbound traffic on the port I'm listening to (not 80 right now). I even pulled my firewall completely.
I tried changing server.listen(4444) to server.listen(4444, '0.0.0.0') as I've seen all over the web. But this doesn't work.
Anyone have ideas out there? I feel like maybe my ISP is blocking it somehow? I'm fairly new to networking, so maybe I'm missing something critical?
Thanks!
server.listen(4444) should be fine. As long as you don't have multiple active network connections in your server, you don't need to specify an IP address. Port forwarding from your router (if configured correctly) will direct the request that came from to public IP address to the actual local IP address of your host.
Note that for port forwarding to work reliably, you will have to give your host a fixed private IP address (not a DHCP assigned address) so the IP address will not vary. Then, you configure port forwarding to that fixed IP address.
Then, you need to do some network debugging. From a computer outside your own network (e.g. something out on the internet), you should do a couple commands to your public DNS name:
ping yourserver.net
tracert yourserver.net
If your DNS entry is not working, ping should tell you immediately that it didn't find yourserver.net.
If the DNS entry is working, but the IP address can't be reached, then ping will tell you that the server is unreachable. At that point, you will know you have a networking issue with connecting to your public IP address from the internet.
If ping is initially finding your server, but packets aren't flowing properly, then either the ping results or the tracert results should give you an idea where to look next.
If ping and tracert are finding your public IP and packets are flowing to/from it, but you still can't connect to it with the browser, then you either don't have the IP address set correctly (so you're not connecting to the right server) or your node.js server isn't listening appropriately or you aren't using the right ip/port in the browser that represents the actual node.js process. If you suspect this to be the case, then back up and make sure you have everything working purely on your own private network where the browser tries to connect directly to the local IP address and port. When that is working, you will know the node.js server is working appropriately and you can move back to working on the public IP.
FYI, if you tell us what the public DNS name and public IP address is, we here can do a few steps of this debugging from our computers.
It may be that your router can only forward a port to a computer on your network, but not change the port when forwarding. If that's the case, then you have these options:
Put everything on port 4444. Have your server listen to 4444, specify 4444 in the port forwarding in the router and then put 4444 in the URL like http://thecastle.ninja:4444.
Set up the port forwarding for port 80, put your server on port 80. Change the port forwarding to port 80. Change your server to listen to port 80 (if your server is Unix, you will need elevated privileges to listen to port 80 directly). You should then be able to use a URL like http://thecastle.ninja.
Set up the port forwarding for port 80, put your server on port 4444 and use ip table settings to route 80 to 4444 on your server. This allows your server to run in the less privileged 4444 port, but lets the end-user use the default port 80. I have a node.js server on a Linux Raspberry Pi configured this way. You should then be able to use a URL like http://thecastle.ninja
Run a proxy on your server that will route port 80 to port 4444. This is probably more than you need, but nginx is a popular one and it can do port forwarding on the server.