Netgear 834 firewall problems

Hello all,

I have recently set up a wireless LAN at home and got broadband. I
have a DG834G for modem/firewall/router. Everything is fine, except I
can't access the web server (Apache) running on my desktop PC from my
laptop. I can share files and ping it quite happily, but when I try to
access the web server I get a 'Cannot Find Server' error.

I have added an inbound rule to the firewall to allow all inbound
connections (from all services) from IP addresses
192.168.0.2-192.168.0.3 (I only have two PCs on the network) but I
still can't access the web page.

I think it is a firewall problem, as I can access the web server quite
happily from the desktop PC.
Does anyone have any clever ideas?

Thanks,
Al.

<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) oups.com...
> Hello all,
>
> I have recently set up a wireless LAN at home and got broadband. I
> have a DG834G for modem/firewall/router. Everything is fine, except I
> can't access the web server (Apache) running on my desktop PC from my
> laptop. I can share files and ping it quite happily, but when I try to
> access the web server I get a 'Cannot Find Server' error.
>
> I have added an inbound rule to the firewall to allow all inbound
> connections (from all services) from IP addresses
> 192.168.0.2-192.168.0.3 (I only have two PCs on the network) but I
> still can't access the web page.
>
> I think it is a firewall problem, as I can access the web server quite
> happily from the desktop PC.
> Does anyone have any clever ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Al.
>
Al, hi

AFAIK you can't access the external address of the router from within the
firewall. In other words if the external IP of your router is 12.34.56.78
you can't access this from your private IP address range (192.168.x.x) on
your LAN (even if you have port forwarding from 12.34.56.78:80 to the
relevant LAN IP of your Apache server). However, if you try it from another
external IP address on the Internet you should find it forwards the packets
to your Apache server fine (if you grant the external IP address inbound
access).

David.

In article <(E-Mail Removed) .com>,
"(E-Mail Removed)" (E-Mail Removed) says...
> Hello all,
>
> I have recently set up a wireless LAN at home and got broadband. I
> have a DG834G for modem/firewall/router. Everything is fine, except I
> can't access the web server (Apache) running on my desktop PC from my
> laptop. I can share files and ping it quite happily, but when I try to
> access the web server I get a 'Cannot Find Server' error.
>
> I have added an inbound rule to the firewall to allow all inbound
> connections (from all services) from IP addresses
> 192.168.0.2-192.168.0.3

These are private addresses, and can't be seen through the router.
If you want local servers to be accessible from the Internet you need
to map router ports (public addresses) to local addresses/ports.

> (I only have two PCs on the network) but I still can't access the web page.

What address are you using to access it?
>
> I think it is a firewall problem, as I can access the web server quite
> happily from the desktop PC.

LAN traffic won't go through the firewall on your router, just the
switch. If you are trying to access your server using an address
like 192.168.0.1 and failing then I suspect you have a misconfigured
software firewall running on one of your machines.

Rob, David,

I am using 192.168.0.3 to access my server (having done ipconfig on the
box). If LAN traffic doesn't go through the firewall than that
explains why adding the rule didn't help! I am running XP on the
desktop PC so it looks like I need to check the XP firewall settings as
it sounds like they may be the problem.

At least I was almost there in thinking it was a firewall problem -
just the wrong firewall! :-)

Thanks for all your help,

Al.

In answer to my problem - I have turned off the windows firewall and
hey presto! I can access the website. Hoorah!