Accessing multiple rails apps from inside network

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all,

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but here goes:

I have a web server at home (Apache2, Ubuntu) that is running two Rails apps. Each app is forwarded to a Mongrel cluster (app1 uses ports 8000 to 8003 and app2 uses ports 9000 to 9003). I have a domain pointing to app1 and a sub-domain pointing to app2 and everything works perfectly from OUTSIDE my local network.

My problem is that my router (I'm on AT&T's U-Verse) will not allow me to make calls to my web server using the public IP address or either one of the domain names (not exactly sure why, but apparently this is a known issue). What I need to be able to do is run either one of these sites from inside my network. If I go to http://192.168.1.69 (the internal IP of my web server) I get the app1 (default) site which is just fine. How do I get to app2 though?

I know this is more of an Apache-specific question, but I thought that since I was dealing with a Rails/Mongrel setup, this might be a good place to start. Any ideas?

Thanks!

-Brian

2

Hi all,

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but here goes:

I have a web server at home (Apache2, Ubuntu) that is running two Rails apps. Each app is forwarded to a Mongrel cluster (app1 uses ports 8000 to 8003 and app2 uses ports 9000 to 9003). I have a domain pointing to app1 and a sub-domain pointing to app2 and everything works perfectly from OUTSIDE my local network.

My problem is that my router (I'm on AT&T's U-Verse) will not allow me to make calls to my web server using the public IP address or either one of the domain names (not exactly sure why, but apparently this is a known issue).

Yeah, some routers don't do that.

What I need to be able to do is run either one of these sites from inside my network. If I go to http://192.168.1.69 (the internal IP of my web server) I get the app1 (default) site which is just fine. How do I get to app2 though?

you could add entries to your /etc/hosts pointing all of the
appropriate subdomains to 192.168.1.69. eg

192.168.1.69 www.example.com 192.168.1.69 other.example.com

or you might find it neater to separate this out

192.168.1.69 www.example.local 192.168.1.69 other.example.local

and then point your browser at www.example.local (you'd have to add www.example.local , other.example.local as server aliases in the appropriate VirtualHost
entries.

Fred

3

Another option would be to run a split-horizon DNS server internally
that will hand out internal ips to internal clients and external ips
to external clients. Look at tinydns / dnscache for a decent solution.

Cheers, Darrik

4

There's a better approach here than working with routers and so forth. Have you checked out Phusion Passenger -- it makes stuff like this really easy without having to mess around with DNS settings. Railscasts did a screencast on it at:

Check it out.

Hope this helps, Neal

5

Thanks for everyone's response! This is exactly what I was looking for...I'll look into the various solutions and see what makes the most sense to my situation.