[clug] web server not serving pages to the internet

[Tony and Robyn Lewis]

Boris Rousak wrote:

>Afternoon to all,
>
>I am having a rather odd problem here. I run a
>web/mail server from home, protected by iptables
>(Alex's talk the other month about firehol was highly
>appreciated :) ). Last week I put a netgear wgt624
>firewall/router thing in between it and the internet,
>and now I can't get to the webserver. 
>...
>So, could anyone suggest clues, but 
>
This is obviously a bit of a stab in the dark, but:
1. logs - apache, firehol/iptables
2. packet sniffing - tethereal is your friend
3. check your routing entries - maybe packets are coming in, but the 
system doesn't know how to send them back out - this is a wild guess 
seeing your email is working

First I would sniff your interface on the apache box and see what it's 
seeing.  Then divide and conquer from there.

>more importantly
>could anyone suggest how could I test what the rest of
>the world sees, from home - because at the moment I
>keep having to ask external people and my MSN list of
>friends is getting shorter with each attempt :).
>  
>
This bit's easy.  You can:
1. use a proxying service - I use megaproxy.com, but only cause it was 
easy to find.  They limit you after a while, so you might want to have a 
few such sites up your sleeve, or pay them.  Go to their website and 
type in the URL and it will fetch it and display it.
2. get a shell account on another machine and use elinks, wget etc.  I 
thoroughly recommend bur.st - you can get a limited free shell, or for a 
one-off donation, get more.  Nice guys, good service.  There are other 
sites though.
3. find a trusted friend with a publicly accessible box, and get them to 
set up HTTP proxying on some port on the loopback. You can ssh into 
that, with port redirection, and set up your browser to use that as a proxy

Detail deliberately omitted to save my fingers.  If you get stuck, 
though, yell out.

Tony Lewis