[ale] Conceptual issue with self-hosting

John Wells jb at sourceillustrated.com
Fri Aug 25 14:38:34 EDT 2006


Trey Sizemore said:
> Hi all-
>
> I'm having a bit of a conceptual issue I'm trying to fight through.  I
> have a domain that I host locally here at home.  I'm assigned a dynamic
> IP by my ISP, so I use zoneedit.com and ddclient to update my A records
> at zoneedit.
>
> My Internet facing IP gets updated periodically and I have A records
> for mydomain.com, www.mydomain.com, and oes.mydomain.com (which all
> point to the same IP address).  Zoneedit also has an MX entry I created
> to pass mail onto oes.mydomain.com.
>
> I have a firewall at home and a DMZ behind which sit a couple of
> boxes.  I have rules in place which pass HTTP packets to Alpha and an
> SMTP proxy setup for mail that gets passed to Bravo.  One box (Alpha
> with IP 192.168.0.200) is a webserver and pointing to mydomain.com or
> www.mydomain.com gives me the index page on Alpha.
>
> The other box (Beta with IP 192.168.0.201) is a mail server.  It also
> has the ability to access mail via a web interface by going to
> 192.168.0.201/mail *internally*.  However, I want to be able to access
> the webmail interface *externally* as well, but of course going to
> mydomain.com/mail or oes.mydomain.com/mail doesn't work.  I assume that
> this is because these requests are going to Alpha and not Beta.
>
> Alpha also acts as the DNS behind the firewall for the machines on the
> subnet.  I have entries for both Alpha and Beta there (A and CNAME
> records with name and IP).
>
> My question is:  how can I access the webmail interface of Bravo on the
> outside given my current setup?

I would either:

A. Since Alpha appears to be your HTTP server, install the mail web
interface there, and point it's configuration to Bravo as the mail server
it interacts with. I'm assuming you use IMAP or POP, and it would be
trivial to tell your mail client on Alpha to go to Bravo and interact with
these services there. You just need to make sure you configure IMAP or POP
to listen to the box's external interface.

B. Use port forwarding. If all 80 (http) traffic currently goes to Alpha,
but you want some http to go to Brave, configure a rule to forward http
traffic on a different port (81) to go to Bravo. Or better yet, forward
port 443 to Bravo and setup mod_ssl.

Hope this helps.

John




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