How To Connect Your Raspberry Pi Server to the Outside World
A tutorial by D.M. W
Once you have your server set up and running you need to make some changes to your home network to allow the Pi to connect to the outside world. A typical home network consists of an Web connection to a router through which local devices are connected. You can usually connect to your router by using your browser to connect to http://192.168.0.1 or something similar. This is the local address of the router and will give you a number of menu options for changing router settings and getting router information.
All devices connected to the router will have addresses that are similar to 192.xxx.x.xx. You can determine the local address of your Pi by looking at the ‘Device Table’ information in your router or by opening up a command line terminal interface and entering the command:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr b8:27:eb:be:3f:bd
inet addr:192.168.0.27 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:15804 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5686 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1205858 (1.1 MiB) TX bytes:2103034 (2.0 MiB)
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1
RX packets:356 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:356 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:27968 (27.3 KiB) TX bytes:27968 (27.3 KiB)
I have added the highlighting to show the local address of my Pi. Yours should be similar. Normally all devices connected to the local network can send input and output to the web through the router but are behind a firewall and cannot be accessed directly from the web. In order to use your Pi as a server you need to provide a path through the firewall so that it can be accessed from the web. This is done on most routers by using the ‘Port Forwarding’ feature that is available. Most servers including the Pi ‘listen’ for connect requests on port 80. You can use the port forwarding setting on you router to connect the local address of your Pi to port 80 on the router. On my router the table looks like this:
Connection Status:
CenturyLink®Broadband
2272/864 Kbps
ISP Status:
Port ForwardingEnter ports or port ranges required to forward Internet applications to a LAN device below.
1. Enter the LAN port and IP information.
-
Starting Port:
Ending Port:
Protocol:
LAN IP Address:
2. Enter the remote port and IP information. (Optional)
-
Starting Port:
Ending Port:
Remote IP Address:
Use 0.0.0.0 for any IP Address
3. Click “Apply” to save your settings.
Port Forwarding List
As you can see I have several ports connected to the Pi. Port 21 is commonly used for FTP access and port 22 for ssh access. These are topics for future postings.
Please not that the 198.xxx.x.xx address is a local address and not the address that your router uses to connect to your ISP. The ISP address can be found in the router general information and status tables. If your Pi is set up correctly you should be able to connect to the Pi server from any device connected to the internet by enteringthe URL http://xxx.xx.xx.x (your router’s ISP web address) in a browser. You should see the default apache web page:
It works!
This is the default web page for this server.
The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet.
More to Come:
R Statistics and Programming 