Apache behind WRT54G

[Brandon D]

Hi all,

I'm back home after spending a year at college where they were nice enough to give us our own static external IP addresses. Showing people stuff on my internal development server then was incredibly easy. Now that I'm home and behind a Linksys WRT54G router on a residential cable account, I'm having issues.

I assigned my server a static internal IP address, gave it the proper subnet and used the router's internal IP as the gateway. I used my ISP's DNS servers in the configuration. After configuring those properties I went into my router configuration and redirected port 80 to my static internal IP address. People can now see my server using my external IP address, but it's incredibly slow. A small image every few seconds kind of slow.

Does anyone know what is causing this? I doubt it's Apache considering I everything loads up fine when accessing it internally. I can't imagine it being the router, but at the same time it seems like it's the most likely culprit. Is there a way around it?

[Velvet Elvis]

What kind of ping response times do you get from outside?

Some time when nobody else is using the connection, try disconnecting the router and connecting the box directly.

A lot of cable companies discourage running a server from home, If they don't flat out forbid it in their AUP. You might want to try running it on a few different ports in case 80 is throttled.

If it's within your ability and your device is supported, check out OpenWrt. If you use that you can know for sure what's going on with the router.

[Mark H.]

If I understand you correctly, you have a server at your home running off a residential Cable Broadband line?

If so, remember that what your visitors perceive as "downloading" data is, in fact, your server "uploading" through the Cable line. And every Broadband provider that I know, for Cable *or* DSL, (at least here) has a fairly low "upload" speed. And that's not port-specific, it's globally capped at that speed. Broadband service elsewhere may well further restrict outbound Port 80 traffic, as Velvet Elvis said.

In my case, I have residential DSL service with 3 megabit download speed, but only 768 kilobit upload speed. And that's considered the "medium" speed package available from my DSL provider. It doesn't matter what ports I use, it's just plain capped at 768 kb. And there's no guarantee I'll get the full 768 kb, either. To their credit, they DO make every effort to give me the full 3mb download speed, but that's it. On a "bad night", my upload speed may drop to 384 kb.

Something to check, anyway. I'd call your Cable provider and ask them.

Also, an actual Switch instead of a multiport Router, may improve things somewhat as was said.

RV