Need some web server help

[wisner]

Not sure if this is the right board for this question but here goes nothing.

I work for a company that does sales and service for the industrial process controls industy. We are an ABB reseller and they recently released a new instrument, the SM500F. It's a videographic chart recorder with an ethernet card and a built in webserver. We'd like to set it up so that we can have it online and viewable to the outside world. As of right now it's setup on our network and only people on our network can view it.

We've got Bellsouth DSL with the Netopia 3347W wireless router. The internet connection is shared over the network. I've followed the steps to create a pinhole, what Netopia calls port forwarding, but I can't seem to be able to access it outside of our network. I know that it has online connectivity because I can get it to e-mail me everytime a certain action happens. Anybody know how I would go about accessing it from the outside world? I've tried using our IP address but that doesn't work. Any ideas?

There's some information on the SM500F available here. (http://www.abb.com/product/seitp330/de276b6db94ebbdcc125711b005e7d23.aspx)


Thanks in advance for any help provided.

[mhall]

I'm not sure from the documentation available whether or not the device listens on a port besides 80. Does the URL you use to access it from inside the LAN have a colon then a number?

Something like:

http://foo.bar.com:8080

If so, then you'll need to make sure you're forwarding to that port through your router if it allows this.

Also, does the device have security settings that limit which IP addresses are allowed to talk to it? Sometimes secure Web-based services won't allow addresses from outside their subnet to talk to them by default.

[wisner]

Unfortunately the documentation provided isn't very detailed. I'm waiting to hear back from the developer in England but the time differences make getting together difficult. I don't know if it has the capabilities to listen to a port other than 80.

The URL used to view it from inside the network is just a generic ip address, http://192.168.0.50.

I don't believe that the recorder has any kind of security settings that would limit the IP addresses but like I said, the documentation isn't very detailed.

There's some information on the ethernet capabilities here. (http://library.abb.com/GLOBAL/SCOT/SCOT203.nsf/VerityDisplay/C24DA59F9B762BB48025704D0045D481/$File/IM_SMENET_3.pdf) It's for a different instrument in the same line but they both use the same software. Again, not much help.

Thanks and I'll gladly take anymore ideas you might have.

Chris

[mhall]

What are the settings on the port forwarding you set up?

When you try to connect to the device from the outside, how does connection fail? Does your browser give you a specific error message? Does it time out or just hang, doing nothing?

[wisner]

I opened up port 8080 as instructed here by Netopia. (http://www.netopia.com/support/hardware/technotes/CQG_025.html)

When I try to connect I get a "the connection has timed out" message. It feels like we're so close but so far away.

Thanks.

[mhall]

O.k. So you have the external port 8080 opened up on your router and forwarded to the internal IP for the device. It should be pointed to port 80 on the device.

Given an external router address of a.b.c.d, you should be pointing your browser at:

http://a.b.c.d:8080

Is that the case? If not, could you give that a try and let me know what happens?