I have set up a LAMP server within a VirtualBox partition using the Ubuntu automatic install. This is the first time I have tried to set up a home server. The installation seems to have been successful and now I am trying to understand my Internet connection.
If I ping google, I get 64 bytes from 67.215.66.132...(in fact, I get this over and over until I stop it). That seems promising.
However, when I run ifconfig, it returns inet addr: 10.0.2.15. I'm not sure what kind of address this is. Maybe a local network address? It is not an address, I can access from a browser so I am not sure if my server is accessible from the outside.
The server is connected via ethernet to a Uverse router.
Ultimately, I want to try to host a single website on this server but I am wondering if I have to make more adjustments to my IP address before proceeding.
Any feedback on the above would be appreciated.
Thanks
21 Answer
* VBox means VirtualBox, when used in this answer
10.0.2.15 is an address that falls in the 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 range, which is a "private network address" range, per RFC 1918 (page 4, section 3 states "private access space" for LANs and Intranets and such). Like network addresses starting with 192.168.*.*, those typically are internal network addresses for the given local network, in this case the 'network' used by VirtualBox on the system. VirtualBox tends to use local addressing within your system for it's virtual machines, so on the host machine you'd have to forward incoming traffic to the internal 10.0.2.15 address.
I'm going to guess that your system/server has one IP address from the router on your home network. You can use that IP address as the destination for the website, however, you cannot get an address more "public" than the 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 range, as it is a "private network" within your system (because VirtualBox is weird that way).
If you have a home system that is the host of the VBox VM behind a router that has an IP address of 192.168.1.194 (for example), and you have your VM on your system with an IP address of 10.0.2.15, the way to get data from the internet to the VM is two stepped, really:
(1) The router will need to route port 80 to 192.168.1.194 (or whatever the actual IP for your host system is, that is to say, the system running the VirtualBox VM.)
(2) Your system will need a specific iptables (or similar firewall) rule to forward port 80 or related ports from the host system to 10.0.2.15 (the VBox VM).
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