How to access guest server from the web

Question

Ok, here's what I want to do: I want to connect to a webserver running on a virtual machine.

I have an Apache webserver running on my host machine: Windows Vista, which can be accessed from the web.

I have VirtualBox running a guest machine: Ubuntu which also has an Apache webserver and I want to be able to access both servers from the web.

I've been searching and searching trying to find out how to do this and I couldn't find any step-by-step instructions on how to set it up.

It looks like reverse proxy will accomplish what I want, but I'm not sure how to set that up either.

Thanks for the help in advance!

Answer 1

There are a few different virtual networking modes.

I recommend you use either Bridged networking when it comes to what you want.

If you choose NAT, you have to configure port forwarding on your host machine in the same way as you do on your router.

If you follow my advice and choose bridged, then, any virtual machine will appear to your network as a physical independent computer. All you need to do is find the IP of your virtual machine (or set it as static), then port forward the web server in the same way as you would any other machine from your router.

Answer 2

I've been doing this with a CentOs server on my VirtualBox

You will need to set the Virtual Machines network as a Bridged Adapter and choose the network adapter that you use network connections for.

Go into your Ubuntu box and it should automatically be assigned an address from DHCP, if not then you will need to set a static IP Address manually in Administration > Network.

Once you have your address, you can check for it using ifconfig then it will return a list of your network interfaces. Look out for eth0 and it's IP Address.

Take a note of this and enter it into your Vista OS' web browsers address bar, the Apache Screen should be showing, or whatever you have used in your www directory.

EDIT:

Since you are using port 80 already and that port is forwarded, what you can do is set the port on the Ubuntu Server to a different one, possibly 8080. Edit your configiration file which may be located at /etc/apache2/apche2.conf.

Then edit the Listen 80 to Listen 8080 and restart apache /etc/init.d/apach2 restart You will then be able to see your Ubuntu installations server at ubuntuhostip:8080

Then simply create a new service in your routers firewall with the start port as 8080 and the end port as 8080 and then set the firewall rules but with the ubuntu ip address set on the 8080 service port.

This way you can access:

Vista Server: mainip

Ubuntu Server: mainip:8080

Answer 3

You can't have two different things answer on the same port (i.e.: 80 for WWW) on the same IP address.

So you need to either change one of the web servers to asnwer on a differnet port (say 81), and then forward that port in your router to the 2nd web server.

Also, if your router is smart enough, you can set it up to answer on the custom port (81) and have it forward to the 2nd web server on port 80 (therefore keeping the webserver configuration on the standard port 80 for internal testing/use).

Either way, from the Internet you would then access web server 1 on the standard port 80 (http://www.servername.com) and the second via the other port (http://www.servername.com:81).