Redmine

That sounds more like a network problem, but here we go. Is there any firewall on the machine? How is the server connected to the "internet"? Is said connection with the internet static? Does it already have a DNS name?

Thank you for responding Felix.

The machine is behind a router(I think this has a firewall but no rules are setup, it is the default out of the box configuration). There is firewall anti-virus/firewall software that runs all the time on the machine that is from the ISP.

The server is a Windows Vista 64 bit, SP2 machine. The machine physically connects to a hub, the hub is then connected to one port of the router, the router is a Siemens modem/router for DSL which connects to the ISP's (telephone companies line).

The machine name is set in windows and it is part of a LAN workgroup 192.168.1.64; the IP is provided by the router but I am willing to make it static or do whatever it takes to get it to work.

Robert

You need to configure your router to forward external requests on port 80 to the machine running redmine. http://portforward.com/ can help you with this.

Welp, I was gonna that's the I'm normally paid for at work to do, but here we go.

Make sure the internal machine running redmine has a static IP, that will save you headaches later. Make sure your router has a DNS name. If you don't have one or are unsure about that, see if your router supports something like that, you will probably find configs for dyndns.com and others. The last bit to connect those 2 parts together is to do what Muntek already posted: forward external requests from your router to the redmine server. If you want your users to not have to enter a port number after the DNS name/web address, use port 80 (that's standard for http:// requests) for the external port and for the port on the redmine server. If you don't care, choose whatever you want. Last but not least: Make sure to disable the firewall on the redmine server for the port you will be serving redmine from, i.e. if currently you access redmine locally through http://localhost:3000 (or something like that), you have to disable the firewall on port 3000. After having done that, you should be able to access redmine through http://the.redmine.servers.ip:3000 from the local network.

Felix, Muntek, thank you for your help.

I can see now, as you have pointed out that my problem is related to networking and not the software, but given my lack of networking experience I didn't see this issue at first.

I checked with my ISP and cannot get a static ip, so I am looking into what it takes to set up a VPN connection. That appears to be the only solution left to me. After buying the portforward.com software I found out that now I also need to buy a new router. The ISP won't let me port forward using PPTP; they have probably downloaded a reduced firmware system into the router. One purchase drags in another and ... none work...

Now to find out about setting up a VPN connection. I think Windows 7 has this facility and I was going to use Shrewsoft as a client. This is out of the scope of this forum I guess, but would you recommend this?

Thanks again.

Ah I didn't mean for you to have to buy that software, the guides on the site itself are more than enough.

What's the model # of your router? Generally you can assign a static internal IP for that computer, forward the port from outside->to that router, then use a (free) service like http://www.dyndns.com/ to get a domain pointed to your home server.

I have a Siemens GigaSet SE567 router. I had to set the port as 8080 because the software said port 80 was blocked. I can see you are right about buying the software. Now I can see that it would have been possible to manually do what this software did which was assign port forwarding to 8080.

I will look at your link, but I don't think I have access to the PPTP port forwarding for this router. I could not find any such entry in any option on the router.

a) Do I assign the host a static IP then in the router set PPTP to forward to port 8080 on the hosts static IP?
b) do I assign the static IP for the host in the router in some way?
c) I am guessing the last step would be to have the router look at a static IP from dyndns.com, is that correct?

Thank you for the help it is appreciated; I realize these are basic questions but as I said I have limited/no knowledge in this area.

I found the problem; thank you for the help.

I had used port 8080 and could not forward the port, changing to 3000 fixed the port forwarding problem. Then I was able to setup the dynamic ip service to update the dns, that worked and we can access Redmine from outside the network.

The way I got the port forwarding to work was to use a free router port forward program from
http://www.pcwintech.com
it worked perfectly and even set the Windows pc to a static IP which was another mistake I had.

Robert Lewis

Glad you got it all sorted out :-)

This is really fantastic product. I have installed Redmine on windows 7, 32 bit using Bitnami and it works great. I can access the system only on that system. But can not access through other systems in same network. I have read through the documentation and watched the video but cannot see how or what to set up to make this application visible to the same network. Can someone offer a pointer to documentation or advice on how to do this please? Thanks in advance.