Website unreacheble by dns adress. works fine from lan, and dns forwards to my wan ip nicely

 

I cannot reach my wordpress website on my server using domain name. only from lan using local ip or localhost.

I am in absolutely the worst IT hell I have experienced for as far as I can remember. I need someone to help me fix this or I will go completely and irrevocable bonkers… or at least more bonkers than I am now. At the face of it most of you will probably smile the way one smiles while thinking “aaah that’s qute”. Then those who are helpfully inclined will start firing off things to do like machine guns.

Those less helpfully inclined will drop the inevitable “Let me google that for you” links with the assholes and trolls dropping in their toxic responses.

It’s okay. Really. 36 hour ago I thought the same thing. 

“Aah, I should have that fixed in no time.”

And went about the normal processes of troubleshooting, headshaking, denials (excuses for doing something you’ve been kind of wanting to do but didn’t really have the time for) and all throughout the process I was sure that I would have it fixed in minutes.

But to this point I haven’t gotten a single step closer to having my website back up and reacheble by the World Wide Webz.

Let me describe the before:

I had a website running on a linux laptop (porteus 5, yeah I know, don’t ask) which I’ve been toying with for about a year now. Nothing fancy, just Wordpress running a content curating rss plugin that posted articles as main content and I had some widgets with a little video, an mp3 and so on. I had also, two months ago, installed the google kit and was trying to get to a point where the automated ad function would make me a millionaire…. Well, show ads to those without the adblocker technology (looolz).

That is not relevant though. What you need to know is that it was running fine, errorless and surprisingly smooth and quick for months. I had an afraid.org dynamic dns subdomain that pointed to my home WAN ip adres, and on my zyxel router I had port 80 forwarded to the local ip adres of the laptop (shut up) the site ran on. I used both port forwarding rules (one for port 80 tcp/udp and one for port 443 tcp/udp) as well as having the local ip adress of the laptop setup to be the DMZ. The reason I had both was that I had some…. Issues getting it to actually work and the last things I did before it miraculously suddenly started to work was those two things. Lazy and “it’s working, don’t touch it… or breath at it” attitudes caused me to let it be and then forgotten. 

Point is that it worked. Every corner of the interwebs could go to deuzige.v0id.nl  and would get onto my website. They could logon, post, remark, vote, play the vids, do the forum and well…. Everything.

Only issues I had was that to use adsense I had to be the owner of a tld and not a subdomain. This I fixed by getting hold of deuzige.ga  and  deuzige.ml and despite having bad experiences in the past with free tld’s (.tk) I was surprisingly happy to see that it actually worked flawlessly.

Until 35+ hours ago.

Cleaning the house as one does, vacuming, I managed to pull the ethernet cable out of the sitecom router I had to split the network upstairs. (ie. a ethernet cable from the Zyxel modem downstairs running to the sitecom router upstairs on which I had disabled the dhcp server and from there I had ethernet cables running to my two non-mainbattlestation machines) It was disconnected for maybe 20 minutes (Friend had come for visit, so I waited with fixing it) and nothing except that had changed in the mean time.

You’d think that plugging the cable back in should be all that was needed to fix it….. But it was not.

Plugged it in, nothing.

Rebooted the laptop. No connection (at all)

Reset the sitecom router (power off/on) Nothing.

The laptop had decided to no longer bring up the network devices at boot. (neither eth0 or wlan0) 

Well, I wasn’t about to let no stinkin’ porteus linux laptop get the better of me!!!! I’z gotz command line skillz!

Half an hour later the $!%#% network cards were both back up, and the laptop was browsing the internet again nicely. Same ip adres, nothing out of the ordinary……

except that deuzige.v0id.nl didn’t work. Trying to open it in a browser got a connection time out error. Well, the next few hours were spent cussing and picking away at anything that could cause a website not to be reachable from the www. As proteus linux isn’t exactly an ordinary one, and not really meant to even be installed on a drive on a computer, let alone be used as a server on a drive on a laptop, I kept beating it up thinking it must be something to do with the proteus stubborn stupidity or related to that that I was missing that kept the site from being reacheble. I could localhost it, I could local ip adres is, having no issues at all, it responded as it should. But as soon as I used the domain name it refused to listen.

I already kind of had noticed that the dns resolution was working when I started to beat up the Zyxel and had removed the port 80 forwarding and found  myself looking at the zyxel router’s configuration logon page when I opened  deuzige.v0id.nl  in the browser.

So traffic was ending up at the router when a domain name was used.

But I was frustnoyed and angrated. (frustrated, angry and annoyed) and totally fed up with the proteus quirkyshitness and made the decision to start from scratch and to run the site and server on and from a USB stick. Then I would not be dependant on a single computer staying in working order for the site to stay alive. I found a way to do it crossplatform and for free and proceeded to format a stick and plemp the software on it. 

I no time I had a running stack (Wordpress on Apache, php, mysql) and I ran it on my mainbattlestation for the time being. It’s an empty clean wordpress, no plugins or content or whatever. It’s a fresh one. It works, I can connect to it and logon to it from localhost, from 127.0.0.1 and from the LAN on the local ip (192.168.1.69) and it works like normal. 

I decided to also reset my Zyxel and even the sitecom so that I had completely fresh and virginned my network. Then I went into the freenom site, and re-created the dns records for the deuzige.ga domain. An A record for deuzige.ga  pointing to my wan ip adres (fresly leased) and an identical one for www.deuzige.ga and I waited for half an hour so the information could propagate nicely through the DNS servers. After I was done taking the dump and finished eating I confidently went to finish up and get the website back online at least…..

Well, let me summarize by saying that the situation is still the same. The site works on localhost, 127.0.0.1 and I can open it from the lan with the local ip adress 192.168.1.69. On the zyxel I have the portforwarding rules set to forward port 80 to  192.168.1.69 and another rule to do the same for port 443. I also have  192.168.1.69 assigned as DMZ.

Before I set those forwarding rules I have tested and deuzige.ga (with or without www) resolves nicely to my WAN ip adress as the router logon page opens when I have not forwarded port 80. 

But as soon as I do that, trying to reach deuzige.ga  results in either a connection refused or a connection timed out.

EVEN from the machine that is running the server and has the  192.168.1.69 ip adress. 

When I portscan the deuzige.ga  I get no ports (at all) are open, unless I have the embyserver running that I use when I want to stream music or vid from the mainbattlestation to another machine in the house. Then I see port 8096 is open. Oddly enough I can’t reach the emby server through the domain adress either. This suddenly only works on LAN too.

I flushed dns, registered dns, I deleted browser chaches , I reset, rebooted and off/on every single item in the network. I have thrown my mouse angrily against the laptop (the laptop lost, but that’s irrelevant), I kicked the desk and even disintegrated my keyboard in a violent and aggressive manner.

Nothing seems to work. I decided that before this would lead to much more severe and more critical damage to either devices or myself I would stop trying to solve this, write the story you’ve been reading so far, and post it on placed people ask questions like this in the hope that some genious will tell me what the frack is causing this problem and how to fix it while I go and take a walk, visit a mate and maybe not think about this for some time. Thusly saving myself the considerable expenses of pshychiatric treatment or worse that undoubtedly would result if I had continued to chase this problem.

So…. Experts…. Geniousses… please…. Educate me…. Tell me…. What stupid thing do I fail to notice, and what (explain it to me like I am mentally damaged and basicly have the brain of a peanutz) should I do to get my website to open up when I point a browser to deuzige.ga?????

Thank you in advance for the overwhelming amount of help you all send me and the awesome help you will be solving this in no time!!!!!

regards,

deuZige