Do you host your own NT driven website?

[Jim A]

Hi All: This is similar to a post I made the other day.  I don't believe I framed the questions well enough, so am trying again.

1. Are any of you hosting your own website in-house (not on a virtual server)?

2. Is it a bad idea to host from a machine on the LAN that has read access to the data?

3. What are the steps for doing this - or can you point me to something I can read in order to figure it out?

Thanks,

Jim

[Poul]

assuming a basic  setup:

virtual or physical  machine (assume local p is 10.0.0.10) with nettalk running on port 88(or 80, whatever).

your router has an Internet IP (if things are simple, whatismyip.com running from a browser on your nettalk server will tell you)
Ideally you have a domain name that points there already eg: Mynettalk.com

thats the ip users can use.

on the router you MUST forward the port that the users will Use to access your nettalk server assume 80 to the local
ip and Port that your Nettalk is running on 10.0.0.10 and port 88.

so an outside user can use " mynettalk.com "   traffic will go to your nettalk server

i assume this how most folks use web facing Nettalk apps. it could be more complicated,...

if your router already uses port 80 you can use different port eg 88, so the user would have to enter mymettalk.com:88

if you have access to your Domain Setup there are a number of ways to make it easier for the user for example
you could forward the domain or a  subdomain  directly to the correct ip and port.eg:  cloud.mynettalk.,com

make sure your nettalk servers firewall is not blocking your. port.

[Jim A]

Thanks Poul.

[Bruce]

>> 1. Are any of you hosting your own website in-house (not on a virtual server)?

yes.  Currently www.biodiversity.co.za is running from our LAN.

>> 2. Is it a bad idea to host from a machine on the LAN that has read access to the data?

no, it's not a bad idea. In some cases a very good idea. (Of course regular data backups are important as always.)

Cheers
Bruce

[Jim A]

Thanks Bruce. It actually seems to be an excellent solution to the problem everyone is facing where data needs to be available in-house and in the cloud. 

I think people are naturally skeptical and nervous about the thought of hosting their own sites because of the ability of hackers to penetrate the system.  Of course, that's from using one of the major webservers.

Does your new book outline the steps for setting everything up?

[Bruce]

Hi Jim,

The book covers some security questions - what you should be worried about, what you don't need to worry about and so on.
But it doesn't discuss setting your router to allow incoming traffic - that will be different for each router model.

cheers
Bruce

[Rene Simons]

Hi,
I have a client set up exactly as Poul describes and it works fine.
There are however cinsiderations that have to be dealt with. But they don't concern NetTalk.
Power supply, local internet outtage, router break down, server hardware issues etc..
I have had all of the above and had to bend over backwards to fix the issues and keep the relationship with my client a happy one.
The issues also helped me to finally convince my client to bring the NTWS application to an external hosting situation. My next project.

Cheers,
Rene