Mystery router config page!

[osibisa]

Hi everybody,

I wonder if anybody can explain to me what is happening with my system. I have a small network at home connected to a Netgear ADSL Modem/Router. DM602. The DM602 is in router mode. I have an HTTP and an FTP port open on 80. The router provides DHCP for my machines except for the server which has a fixed IP address.

My Dynamic IP address is sorted by using no-ip.
I have my own domain name which is redirected to my no-ip domain
I am running Abyss webserver software and FTP Bullet Server software.
Both of the servers are working perfectly ok and are accessible form the outside world, however. If I try to access them from one of my internal machines, using my domain name, (as if I was typing it on an external computer) the page that is displayed is the configuration login page for the router! I can only access my website from an internal machine if I use the server IP address or //localhost. The IP address of the router/modem is 192.168.0.1

I am just interested in what is going on here, I cannot work out how this is happening and would be very obliged if someone can tell me. I have since discovered that a colleague of mine also has the same problem.

One last question. How can they give away such a wonderful piece of software such as Abyss for free? I am looking for the catch!
Many thanks in anticpation.
Peter

[Anonymoose]

Most (all?) routers cannot handle loopback traffic - in other words, traffic originating from inside the LAN which has an external IP (your website) as a request but would go directly back onto the LAN via port forwarding if it was served...

e.g Your machine is 192.168.0.2, your server is 192.168.0.3 and your router is 192.168.0.1. Your domain name www.anonymoose.com resolves to 123.123.231.231 via no-ip, which is the external IP of your router. You attempt to view your server from your PC (.0.2) on the LAN, Windows resolves the IP as 123.123. etc via DNS, determines the traffic is for an external network and sends it to the router. The router realises 123.etc is it's own IP, and either drops the traffic, fails to return it, or in your case returns it's own port 80 information instead.

You can avoid this conflict by adding your domain name to your windows hosts file and use the internal IP of the machine that runs the server for the address - now before attempting to lookup traffic via the router, Windows will resolve the name from the hosts file and send the traffic directly to the server via the LAN.

It is a little worrying that you get the router config page - I'd double check that your config option are not available from outside the LAN by getting one of your friends to test it for you...

[osibisa]

Many thanks. All is reveiled.
Did as suggested and the config page is not accessible from the Webside of router. Host file suggestion seems like a reasonable get-around. Thanks for swift reply.

Peter