It’s been a long while since I’ve given web hosting much thought. The last few years have centered around storage area networks, virtualization, and the nitty-gritty of what goes on inside an All-Flash-Array.

Recently, I’ve found myself wanting to get back into a few hobbies and interests, including web hosting and WordPress. There are a few ideas that I hope to explore. The first thing I want to do is set up a personal server. I’ve taken an older i5-based desktop and installed Gentoo Linux on it. I’m calling it my Lab.

Setting up Gentoo has reminded me of how much I only kind of remember in setting up a personal server. It’s also given me some ideas on posts I should make in the future. However, those will have to wait until I have at least the basics in place.

For today, I’m attempting to configure a Centurylink Technicolor c2100t DSL modem. As things sit, most of my home network is wireless these days. I’m using the modem’s WiFi for a lot of it. If I’m going to run a personal server, I want it to be accessible from the outside.

Everything on the network uses the modem’s DHCP and DNS services. It makes sense that I want to log into the modem and configure a static address for my new Lab, then do Port Mapping to those services I want to export.

The Centurylink Technicolor c2100t DSL modem has an Advanced Setup option, which has all of the interesting settings.

With the options available in the settings, I could just exclude an address from the DHCP pool and statically assign an IP on the server. However, I like to make things difficult… The modem supports DHCP Reservations. With reservations, I should be able to have the DHCP server assign a specific IP address based on the MAC address of the network card in the server.

Looking though the “Steps”, step 1 allows you to enable or disable the feature. We want it enabled. Step 2 is kind of interesting. It attempts to permanently assign an IP address to whatever connects, based on a pool of addresses defined in step 3. I had to clear this list before proceeding as the option is on by default and all the addresses were already in use.

Step 4 offers a convenient drop-down, listing all the devices the modem remembers, by preferred host name and MAC address. It was easy to find my Lab device. Step 5 asks what IP address you want assigned to the device. I left it set to the default, 192.168.0.2.

After applying the changes, and refreshing the screen, I renewed the DHCP lease on Lab and was greeted with a new IP, 192.168.0.3. Checking the DHCP Reservation List on the modem confirmed this address. I guess it didn’t like what I chose. Hopefully it sticks.

Now that we have a permanent IP address inside the LAN, we need to route traffic from the external IP address to the services on Lab that we want to export. There are two options here, DMZ hosting, or Port Forwarding. DMZ hosting places IP address outside of the modem’s firewall and then directs all connections to the IP. This might be something I want after everything is set up. However, for now, I just want port 80 (the web server) to be exposed.

For step 1, the dropdown didn’t have my device this time, so I opted to enter the IP manually. Step two asks which range of ports do we want to forward. I went a head and entered 80 for both starting and ending. In step 3 we are asked about the protocol. The default is fine. Step 4 allows us to restrict the forward to specific source IP address. I’m fine with everyone having access.

The last step is to test it. Since we are wanting to see that it works from outside the LAN, I tried my current external address from my phone, after making sure WiFi was disabled.