Trying to set up webserver ... connection refused?

Hi,

I'm currently on a 512kbps service from Freedom2surf (UK ISP). I'm trying to set up one of my home systems to act as a webserver, and have had partial success.

It will always serve pages properly on the local network, but all too often I get a "connection refused" error when connecting from outside.

I have the router (Netgear DG824m) set to redirect all http traffic to the webserver (it's fixed at 192.168.0.2 locally), but sometimes it just refuses to accept connections.

Turning on the DMZ server settings to point at 192.168.0.2 can make it work briefly, then it starts blocking again. Likewise, turning off the DMZ settings can see external links come to life, before they all get refused again.

I don't see what could be stopping the traffic getting through. One bizarre thing I noticed, however, was that I could reach the external address when I was under Windows XP just fine (the laptop and webserver are both running Slackware Linux 9.0), but I don't see how my laptop could interfere with the router settings? At the moment I've got UPnP turned off at the router end. All computers on my network are assigned their IP's when they connect, so I know that the webserver should always be at 192.168.0.2.

Anybody have any suggestions?

Cheers,
Stween

It would be useful to have your IP address so I can test/debug the problem from here.

Are you sure that your ISP is not blocking/interfering with incoming port 80 traffic? Sadly, some of them do.

No, the ISP isn't blocking port 80, since I can access the website when I'm away from home (in which case, the laptop isn't running).

The only time the website becomes inaccessible is when I'm running my laptop under Linux.

... and I'm unsure as to what me giving out my IP address will achieve...

go to you ISP modem page (for me its 192.168.1.254... not sure if there all this) and then from under advance, do config, and then enable http on only 1 machine, cause it seems that since both are running linx, its getting confuessed, or you might want to try and stop or shut down IIS or what ever hosting program linx using all together. worked for me, so maybe it can work for you too :-)

My Netgear DG824M Router has started doing the same.

it has worked fine for months but no for some reason it seems to have developed a problem.

I was getting the same problem with connection refused when trying to access my webiste which runs on apache(Red Hat 9).

When i turn off my windows PC it all works.
I installed a Web Server on my windows pc and when i reboot the router, i get my linux one for about 20 refreshes and then the windows one kicks in.

The router is set to forward all traffic to my linux machine.

If i block port 80 at the router to my windows machine then it all starts working correctly again exept that the windows pc cannot now access the web.

Nothing has changed for months so i am thinking this may be a netgear bug!!!

That's the conclusion I've come to. I've tried various things, as can be seen from this thread, but have had to give up (for now ... if I get time at a later date, I'll start looking back into it).

I have found that if i make my windows pc the DMZ pc then all appears to work fine.

if i make the linux one DMZ i get the same problem.

typical the one with the decent build in firewall is the one which sits nicely behind the netgear firewall.

Not a nice solution as it should work without using DMZ but days of playing around and that is about the only way i can find to fix it.

Unfortunately for me, no amount of fiddling with the DMZ settings has helped. I would have thought it was a Linux problem, since the problem only appears to happen when I'm running Linux on my laptop, but there's no evidence that I can see to really suggest anything other than a Netgear bug.