CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsnetwork-programmingdnsipport
Adam
Adam

Reputation: 301

Node server fails to listen to public IP

I am trying to get my Node.js server to listen to a public IP so that I can access it on a different network than my home network.

I've purchased a domain and used a DNS host - right now I'm using No-IP and have downloaded their client to push my IP to their servers.

When I set the IP on No-IP configuration to my local IP I can use the domain name and hit my server on another computer on my network. But if I change this to my public IP and use the domain, the request hangs for about 10 seconds and then fails. I've set up port forwarding (I believe correctly) and opened inbound / outbound traffic on the port I'm listening to (not 80 right now). I even pulled my firewall completely.

I tried changing server.listen(4444) to server.listen(4444, '0.0.0.0') as I've seen all over the web. But this doesn't work.

Anyone have ideas out there? I feel like maybe my ISP is blocking it somehow? I'm fairly new to networking, so maybe I'm missing something critical?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 9689

Answers (1)

jfriend00
jfriend00

Reputation: 707456

server.listen(4444) should be fine. As long as you don't have multiple active network connections in your server, you don't need to specify an IP address. Port forwarding from your router (if configured correctly) will direct the request that came from to public IP address to the actual local IP address of your host.

Note that for port forwarding to work reliably, you will have to give your host a fixed private IP address (not a DHCP assigned address) so the IP address will not vary. Then, you configure port forwarding to that fixed IP address.

Then, you need to do some network debugging. From a computer outside your own network (e.g. something out on the internet), you should do a couple commands to your public DNS name:

ping yourserver.net
tracert yourserver.net

If your DNS entry is not working, ping should tell you immediately that it didn't find yourserver.net.

If the DNS entry is working, but the IP address can't be reached, then ping will tell you that the server is unreachable. At that point, you will know you have a networking issue with connecting to your public IP address from the internet.

If ping is initially finding your server, but packets aren't flowing properly, then either the ping results or the tracert results should give you an idea where to look next.

If ping and tracert are finding your public IP and packets are flowing to/from it, but you still can't connect to it with the browser, then you either don't have the IP address set correctly (so you're not connecting to the right server) or your node.js server isn't listening appropriately or you aren't using the right ip/port in the browser that represents the actual node.js process. If you suspect this to be the case, then back up and make sure you have everything working purely on your own private network where the browser tries to connect directly to the local IP address and port. When that is working, you will know the node.js server is working appropriately and you can move back to working on the public IP.

FYI, if you tell us what the public DNS name and public IP address is, we here can do a few steps of this debugging from our computers.

It may be that your router can only forward a port to a computer on your network, but not change the port when forwarding. If that's the case, then you have these options:

  1. Put everything on port 4444. Have your server listen to 4444, specify 4444 in the port forwarding in the router and then put 4444 in the URL like http://thecastle.ninja:4444.

  2. Set up the port forwarding for port 80, put your server on port 80. Change the port forwarding to port 80. Change your server to listen to port 80 (if your server is Unix, you will need elevated privileges to listen to port 80 directly). You should then be able to use a URL like http://thecastle.ninja.

  3. Set up the port forwarding for port 80, put your server on port 4444 and use ip table settings to route 80 to 4444 on your server. This allows your server to run in the less privileged 4444 port, but lets the end-user use the default port 80. I have a node.js server on a Linux Raspberry Pi configured this way. You should then be able to use a URL like http://thecastle.ninja

  4. Run a proxy on your server that will route port 80 to port 4444. This is probably more than you need, but nginx is a popular one and it can do port forwarding on the server.

Upvotes: 2

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