Hosting a Web Site on BT Broadband - Configuring BT Home Hub

Configuring your BT Home Hub - Port Forwarding 

Following on from my previous Blog posts about setting up a "hobby" web site that is hosted at home using your BT Broadband, the next article covers how you can make the server you are configuring available for browsing.

Your BT Home Hub comes with a Control Panel that allows you to configure some basic and more advanced settings.  This can be access using the following URL (web address), this is the BT Home Hub Manager Home Page:

http://bthomehub.home/

The BT-Home-Hub-Manager - bthomehub.home

The BT Home Hub Manager Home Page should show your available BT services and the computers (and other devices) that are connected to your Home Network.  It's important that the computer that you are intending to use as your Web Server is visible in the list entitled "My Home Network".  More about your server on your home network can be seen in the previous Blog post about Setting up your Local Network.

To configure the necessary settings that will allow your server computer to act as a Web Server on the Internet, you will need to access the Settings pages.  This will require a login after clicking the "Settings" tab on the Home Hub manager page main menu.

BT Home Hub Manager - Settings (Log in)

To make your Web Server available to the Internet, you will need to add some new settings within the "Port Forwarding" section of the Control Panel's settings.  Port Forwarding is used by devices and applications, such as servers, to make sure that data coming from the Internet gets to the device that needs to use it.  When Port Forwarding is enabled, your BT Home Hub will send all incoming traffic for that application to the chosen device. 

BT Home Hub Manager - Port Forwarding

This is required because your BT Home Hub only has one ip address and yet you will (possibly) has several devices (including the BT Home Hub itself) that incoming traffic needs to access.  Once things are configured correctly, a request from the Internet to the ip address of your Home Hub will be forwarded on to the appropriate device based on the correct port.

BT Home Hub Manager-  Select Devices

This process involves selecting a "game or application" from the list of available in the drop down menu to the left of the page.  There are quiet a few pre-configured entries to choose from, but you need to look for the ones related to "http" and "Web".  There should be for relevant entries in total.  These are as follows:

• HTTP Server (World Wide Web)
• HTTPS Server
• Secure Web Server (HTTPS)
• Web Server (HTTP)

As far as I can see, there seems to be some duplication here.  I would personally suggest that there are only really two options here, for http and https (the secure/encrypted version of the protocol), but selecting everything doesn't seem to cause any conflicts and everything works perfectly well when you do.

• HTTP Server (World Wide Web) is the same as Web Server (HTTP)
• HTTPS Server is the same as Secure Web Server (HTTPS)

I presume the doubled up entries are just to make it easier to find the appropriate thing dependant on the terminology used?  e.g. Some people will look for web server whilst others will look for http.  It's also unlikely that you'll actually need to use the Secure http (https) for secure/encrypted web pages, but there's no harm in setting it up ready for later.

In my case, the server that I want to use as a web server had been named as SERVER-03, but yours will very likely be something different.  It is just a case of now finding the four entries in the "game or application" list and then selecting the appropriate computer from the "Devices" list on the right hand side of the page.  Each time you select the necessary application and the chosen device a button becomes available to allow you to "Add" the settings to the list.

What this process is effectively doing is setting up the rules relating to which port belongs to which device, and that access to this port will be permitted through the BT Home Hub Firewall.  The settings are not really visible, as you are just selecting an application that's already been configured on the Home Hub, but the port that is normally used (the standard or expected port) for web servers is port 80.  Therefore, to check that the settings have been effective, you need to check that the port is now open and can be used.  To do this, you can use a test that is available through various downloadable applications or more easily on some network and configuration tools within web sites.  I have previously used the Open Port Check Tool on the following web page to Test Port Forwarding on my BT Home Hub:
 
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/

Yougetsignal.com - Open Port Check Tool

To use this page to check, you need to ensure that the "Remote Address" is set to your current external ip address (there is actually a link under the input field to "Use Current IP") and that the port number input field has the number "80" in it.  When you click the "Check" button, you should see a green flag and the message "Port 80 is open on xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx", where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is your current ip address on the Internet.

Having got this aspect of you home hosting set up to work, if you haven't already, you need to consider the Domain Name and set up the Dynamic DNS.  The full set up related Blog posts are as follows:

• Hosting a Web Site at Home on BT Broadband
• Procuring and setting up a Web Server
• Setting up your Local Network
• Acquiring and configuring a Domain Name
• IP Addresses and Dynamic DNS

Hosting a Web Site on BT Broadband - Web Server

Procuring and setting up a Web Server

Following on from my previous article, Hosting a Web Site at Home on BT Broadband, I'm going to now look at how you could obtain a basic web server relatively inexpensively and set it up so that you can host a (or some) hobby web site from home using your BT Broadband.


If you are going to set up your own server, just be aware that any data transferred from your server to anybody accessing your web site will be included in your monthly bandwidth.  Another thing to be aware of, due to the nature of ADSL (Asymmetric digital subscriber line), is that the upload speed, which is going to be your user's download speed, is slower than your normal download speed.  However, I've viewed my pages from other computers outside of my network many times and the speed of page load never seems to be an issue.


I've had web sites hosted at home for quite a few years now, as I say, not something I recommend for anything serious or for a commercial enterprise, but can be a cheap way to set up you own personal web sites.  Also, with all the hardware and software at home, it means that you can have full access to the server, whereas you may not get this level of access from a hosting provider.  I initially set things up with a very basic specification desktop PC and installed a copy of Windows 2003 Server.  This machine gave up last year, another thing to be aware of if you're hosting something important, so I had to acquire a new machine, reconfigure it, install software and restore the files from a back-up.

My replacement, is still a fairly low spec. desktop PC, but I increased the RAM a bit whilst setting it up.  I got and old DELL Optiplex GX620 SFF with an Intel Pentium 4 processor from Ebay and was fortunate enough to find one with Windows Server 2008 installed.  I won it in an auction for £29.99 + £13.99 for the postage & packaging, so the whole thing including the new RAM cost near enough £60.  I managed to buy my server from a seller that seems to be selling old office equipment including old PCs fairly regularly (linda25setp2007), so it's likely that she'll have other similar items coming up in the future.

A DELL Optiplex GX620 SFF

Once you've got the server up and running from a hardware, operating system and basic config perspective, you need to think of somewhere you can keep it that's out of the way.  This location needs to be accessible,  cool and dry.  Do bear in mind that the server will need to be switched on all the time (24/7/365), so if it's in a room you use often the noise from the fans may be annoying.  I use an area under my stairs.  It's out of the way, but not too difficult to get to if I need to access it for maintenance.  I had a VDU (monitor) attached to it whilst I did the basic installs and set-up up but then I took that away (once the computer was properly installed on my network) and now connect to it remotely using RDC (a Remote Desktop Connection).  However, you could carry on working directly on the computer to make the set-ups and leave the monitor connected at least until you go live or all of the time if you have a spare one.  I'll cover more about how to make the Remote Desktop Connection in the following Blog post about Setting up your Local Network

The important thing, before you consider having you server available to the World Wide Web, is that you are able to serve web pages from it using IIS.  This was covered in my last Blog post (the first in the series) entitled "Hosting a Web Site at Home on BT Broadband".

I have a number of "hobby" sites set up on my web server and I configure these using the IIS 7 (Internet Information Services) Manager that is available on Windows 2008 (...other versions are used on other Windows operating systems).  The web site that I may use to discuss a specific point will be www.waltonledale.co.uk, but I will not be writing about how to carry out much of the configuration in IIS.  I will cover a handful of specific points directly related to hosting your site(s).

Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 Manager

Firstly, once you have you site(s) ready to serve, you need to be mindful that your server is only going to have one (static) ip address within your network and one (dynamic) ip address to the outside world (on the Internet).  To ensure that incoming http requests get to the correct site you will need to configure the "Bindings" to enable each site to use a specific Host Address.  The settings are available from the right hand panel of the IIS Manager and the settings need to be configured like so:

Edit Site Binding - IIS Web Site Configuration

 The 'Type' should be set to 'http', the 'IP address' should be set as 'All Unassigned' and the 'Port' would generally be the standard http port (80).  The "Host Name" should match the Domain Name that you want to use for the web site.  Please note this must be a Domain (or Sub Domain) that you own and have access to the configuration of.  You are going to need to alter the DNS, which will be covered in a later Blog post (IP Addresses and Dynamic DNS), so you will need access to this to make everything work.

Please see my next post about Setting up your Server on your Local Network and all the posts related to Hosting a Web Site on BT Broadband as follows:

• Hosting a Web Site on BT Broadband
• Setting up your Local Network
• Acquiring and configuring a Domain Name
• Configuring your BT Home Hub
• IP Addresses and Dynamic DNS