clients can't connect with web server

[habbay]

I run Apache 2 on fedora 14 on a small network. All clients can ping webserver successfully but all clients find it difficult to connect with webserver via their individual web browsers. If i access the server physically on its web browser using localhost it responds fine but it doesn't respond from an external client's web browser. I have a feeling that the sever configuration is a cause, i just can't pinpoint the actual cause. i'll be glad for your inputs. Thanks

[cnamejj]

I can give you a couple things to try to help isolate the problem. You can run the following commands to see if there's really a server listening for connections on the HTTP port of your server.

lsof -i tcp:80

netstat -an | awk '/^tcp/ && /LISTEN/'

They pretty much do the same thing. The difference is that the second one, while clunkier, can be run by normal users and only shows listening connections on the port 80 locally. The first one is simpler but you have to run it as "root" and it will show connections to port 80 on external systems if there are any on the server.

If you do see a LISTEN active on port 80 for something other then "localhost" or "127.0.0.1", then Apache is waiting for connections to that IP address. To see if that's working you can run this command after logging into the host running the Apache server.

curl --url http:IP-ADDRESS-HERE

where "IP-ADDRESS-HERE" is the IP address of the server, meaning the one that showed up on the output from the earlier commands. If you get a good response back with the "curl" command, then your Apache server is up, running and ready to handle HTTP requests.

And at that point I'd recommend looking into firewall configs on your server or on the network. But I'd recommend verifying that the Apache server will response on it's external address from the local system first.

[mizzle]

you need to allow inbound connections on port 80.

You can use iptables, or system-config-firewall