Why can I see it an you cant?

[morbidpalooza]

I have my server and mysql running fine my local network can see the forums games and website I have on my server but when I gibe my ip address to my friend he can not see anything?

[Harry Kuhman]

I have my server and mysql running fine my local network can see the forums games and website I have on my server but when I gibe my ip address to my friend he can not see anything?

What ip address do you gibe to your friend? If you have a local network then I certainly hope and expect that you have a router in place connecting to your DSL or cable modem. That router provides a set of local IP addresses to your local network (almost always in the range of 192.168.xxx.xxx) that can not be routed over the Internet. For that matter I and hundreds of thousands of others are using these same addresses on our networks too, so there would be no way that your friend could find you by a 192.168.xxx.xxx address.

Your router gets an address that can be reached across the Internet. You can find it by looking at your router setup, or you can use one of several sites like http://checkip.dyndns.org/ to help determine what IP address the rest of the world sees for you. Your friend should be able to reach you by that address. However, once a packet reaches the router from the outside world, it has to know what local address to send it to. It does this automatically when you web browse or innitiate other actions, because it knows what systems sent out requests and includes a port number in the request to respond to. It knows which ports it assigned to each computer, thus many computers can browser the Internet (even browse the same wabsite) and the router knows which incoming packest go to which system by the port number on the incoming packet. But since the request from your friend originated from outside, the router may not know what to do with those packets unless you have configured it properly.

You can go into your router setup and assign different incoming ports to different systems. These systems should be running servers for the appication that uses that port. For example, I have an FTP server that I run on one of my systems. That system has a local IP address of 192.168.1.102. If I don't set up the router, any FTP request that comes in on my public address would not be properly router and would just be dropped, so the FTP server would be a private local server. But if I tell the router to forward port 21 (the FTP port) to 192.168.1.102, the I can allow others to access my FTP server from the Internet (it's rather wise to be sure that the FTP server is secured by passwords before doing this, and to pick FTP software that doesn't have security problems, because if you do not you can be assured that hackers will find that system within the hour, but that's a different issue).

Another thing that you might also want to do is look into one of the free services like dyndns.org. They will give you a free URL that can be linked to your IP address, so your firends can access you by a URL rather than an IP address. This is particularly handy if your ISP doesn't provide you a static IP address but changes yours from time to time. You can update the URL at the service provider so it will always point to your current IP address. Some routers will do this for you automatically. In other cases you have to do the update manually or run a small program on one of your computers to do the update when needed.

[morbidpalooza]

Does it matter if I am on dial up?

and I am networked to a windows box that is connected to the internet on dialup

[morbidpalooza]

Also when I got my ip address from that link you posted and I put it in my address bar on my browser it said connection refused!

[Harry Kuhman]

Does it matter if I am on dial up?

and I am networked to a windows box that is connected to the internet on dialup

Yea, it matters a lot. I don't expect Windows "connection sharing" to let this work for you at all.

[Harry Kuhman]

Also when I got my ip address from that link you posted and I put it in my address bar on my browser it said connection refused!

Yea, I can believe that. As far as your local network is concerned, that's not an address that you can reach. Some routers would allow what's called "loopback" and let you originate a connection to the Internet IP address of the router, then loop it back to the LAN again. But many routers will not do that. And I would find it extremely unlikely that Windows connection sharing would do it. Plus I doubt that you have any way under connection sharing to configure the windows box that is on the modem to forward packets to other systems. It would not work if you used connection sharing on a high speed connection either; this really needs both a high speed connection and a router to be useful.

[morbidpalooza]

Also when I got my ip address from that link you posted and I put it in my address bar on my browser it said connection refused!

Yea, I can believe that. As far as your local network is concerned, that's not an address that you can reach. Some routers would allow what's called "loopback" and let you originate a connection to the Internet IP address of the router, then loop it back to the LAN again. But many routers will not do that. And I would find it extremely unlikely that Windows connection sharing would do it. Plus I doubt that you have any way under connection sharing to configure the windows box that is on the modem to forward packets to other systems. It would not work if you used connection sharing on a high speed connection either; this really needs both a high speed connection and a router to be useful.

Thank's Harry you have been Alot of help!