Web server: external connections get back the LAN IP instead of the webpage

Question

I'm trying to set up a simple web server with my Pi. I have a WordPress installation on Apache and it works well. (I can see the website when I access the Pi's LAN IP on my home network).

I set my router, (Vigin Media Hub 2), to assign a specific IP. (Say 192.168.0.20) to the Pi based on it's MAC address and set up port forwarding to the port that goes to 192.168.0.20.

Here is the odd thing: if I try to connect to the server from an outside network, the external IP will resolve to the local IP (192.168.0.20) of the Pi. So, of course, it can't connect since 192.168.0.20 isn't a WAN IP.

Can anyone advise me on what could be going wrong?

Answer 1

My guess is that either Apache or WordPress is sending a 302 redirect after the first connect. Something like this:

• you connect to mydomain.foo:80
• you send GET / HTTP/1.0
• you send Host: mydomain.foo
• either Apache or WordPress says "nope, but I can send you to the real website, which is http://youripaddress" on an HTTP 302

You can verify this by using a developer tool like here in Chrome or here in Firefox and load the page. If I'm right, you should see the first connection come in and then the redirect sent.

If I'm right, you can fix this probably at the WordPress level. See this question:

Log in to your WordPress admin panel, go to Settings > General in the menu.

Check that the fields for both 'WordPress Address (URL)' and 'Site Address (URL)' have the correct site address that you want to use.

If not, check the Apache level, particularly ServerName and ServerAlias in the Apache config. It would help to get used to generating requests manually for troubleshooting.