Topic: External interface configuration question

[Peasant]

Hi,

My set up is as follows:

SME Server connects to a D-Link DSL-300T adsl modem. The modem has an IP of 192.168.1.1, and has a DHCP server. When I set up SME 7.1 initially, I chose to give the external NIC a static IP of 192.168.1.10, and the gateway as 192.168.1.1.  All went well, and I had access to the Internet from my network. However, there was no external access to the web server on SME. Running Shields Up showed that things were totally stealthed - nothing open at all, no response to ping, nothing. After a bit of fruitless fiddling I reconfigured the server to get the external IP by DHCP, using the ethernet address. On reboot everything works fine. Running shields up now shows ports 80, 25, and 443 to be open, and I have external access again.

OK, I thought, lets turn the DHCP server on the modem off, and go back to a static IP for the external card on SME. On running the configuration I noticed that the static IP it suggested was the static IP allocated by my ISP, not one in the range of the modem, so I set this back to 192.168.1.10. The result was the same as before - access to the Internet, but no external access to my web pages.

Can someone kindly explain why it is working like this? Many thanks.

[mmccarn]

I've seen a couple ISP's now that hybrid routers that are both routers & modems - I can get to the Internet from behind the router  using a private IP (192.168.1.x) *or* a public IP assigned by my ISP.  Perhaps you're running into something like this?  (You'd need to reconfigure in the way that worked, then run "ifconfig" to see what your IP addresses are...).

As originally configured - SME at 192.168.1.10, D-Link at 192.168.1.1 - you would have to either configure port forwarding on the D-Link for each port you want connected to the SME server, or you'd have to configure the SME server IP as the "DMZ" host in the D-Link.

[Peasant]

Thanks for that. I'm just trialling SME at the moment, my 'live' setup uses the same modem, but it goes to a USR Wireless Turbo Access Point and router. I bought this by mistake thinking it was an ADSL router, so had to get the modem as well. This is set to get the IP address by DHCP as well, and the IP address passed through is the IP address assigned by my ISP, so it must have something to do with the modem I guess.

I've another modem I'll have a try with when I get time to see what happens.

Thanks again.