What can I say? this one has been on my wish list for a VERY long time, and thanks to a new friend of mine, Brent Brunner, I can finally see my BSP’s/web applications somewhere beyond my local machine. It is so cool, for first time I know that my Rapier BSP doesn’t work on the Safari browser (not great, but now I can address it). So for anyone out there, here are the basic steps to accomplish this:
On the Virtual Machine
1. be sure the network is setup as a bridged adapter.
2. for that adapter, you need to set the network to be a static IP address. It doesn’t really matter what address you pick, but you don’t want it changing. So go into your network adapter and specifically enter the IP address/gateway/etc… If not sure of all these values, use the CMD prompt and the command: ipconfig -all This will give you all the network numbers you need.
3. find out what port SAP is expecting for <HTTP Port>. You can use transaction SMICM. by default, the value is 8000.
On your router settings: (I’m not going into much detail here since very router is different).
1. find your primary machine. You need to set this as a static IP address. It should match the IP address you chose on the virtual machine. On my AT&T Uverse box, I went to LAN–>IP Address Allocation. I found my actual computer, and set it to the IP address from step 2 above.
2. you need to define some exception ports. Is should be the same port you found in transaction SMICM. For this I went to Firewall–>applications and I clicked add a new application. Then I filled in TCP/IP and the ports I wanted to exempt. Then I selected my main system, and attached the applications.
Find your public IP address
1. You can use the website: www.whatismyIP.com this is now the IP address that the outside world can use to connect to your system.
On your hosting site (for me it was hostgator).
1. create a subdomain = to your virtual system name.
2. Create a DNS entry for your subdomain.domain = your public IP Address
3. Wait 12 – 24 hours for the changes to propogate through the web. (this was the part I hated, because I didn’t know if it was working).
Accessing your stuff.
now any BSP’s or anything like that, you’ll need to first give the server, so it will be the subdomain.domain:<HTTP port>/sap/bc/…
I hope I’m not forgetting any steps. I don’t pretend to be an expert about this, but I’ve spent the last 24 hours learning from Brent and trying to make it all work. Now as of tonight, it’s all working. Very exciting to a geek like me. Here’s my disclaimer. I’m fairly sure my network is still secure, but like anything, when you open doors, someone could get in. Make sure your anti-virus software is up to date, and keep on the lookout for anything strange. Who knows? I might have to turn it off at some point and pay the $$$ for a VPN to do the same stuff, or other such fancy networking stuff.
Thanks for reading…
And a special thanks to Jeremy Meier… without your connection, i’d still be stuck with a local machine 🙂