Making a internal rails server reachable from the internet

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello list,

I do my rails development on a XP machine. In order to test the deployment scheme as well as capistrano deployment, I’ve set up a local Virtual Machine (VMWare 6) with Ubuntu 7.04. I’ve set it up to use bridged networking so it would appear as a regular machine o my LAN subnet. Everything went fine, I’ve configured it with Apache, mongrel, set up capistrano and so on.

Inside my LAN, I can happilly access this machine by pointing to its IP addres in the browser of any other machine in the LAN (including the host XP machine).

What I would like to do is to make this Virtual ubuntu rails box available to the internet so that people outside my LAN could access it (through my external IP address). The machine with the internet connection is the host XP machine.

Does anyone have any idea on how could I do it ?

Thanks in advance,

Marcelo.

2

Could I just have my mongrels on this VM server and use the XP’s Apache as the front-end with mod_proxy_balancer?

Thanks,

Marcelo.

3

Without really knowing what your network setup is, I'd say that what you're going to have to do is set up some port-forwarding in your router or firewall so that people hitting your external IP on port 80 (for example) are forwarded in to the internal machine you want them to hit.

I would just add that, obviously, doing this sort of thing carries numerous security implications, so tread carefully.