Luke Burns's questions

I'm using a fresh install of Centos 5.5. I have Node installed and working (I'm just using Node -- no apache, or nginx.), but I cannot figure out how to make a simple server on port 80. Node is running and is listening to port 80. I'm just using the demo app:

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
  res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(80, "x.x.x.x");
console.log('Server listening to port 80.');

When I visit my IP, it does not work. I obtained my ipaddress using ifconfig. I've tried different ports. So there must be something I am missing.

What do I need to configure on my server to make this work? I would like to do this without installing apache or nginx.

Luke

Edit-- Ok so, I installed nginx and started it up, to see whether or not it is related to node, and I don't see its welcome page. So it definitely has something to do with the server.

Am I retrieving the IP Address correctly by running: ifconfig then reading the inet addr under eth0?

In software installation tutorials, they always have a long list of dependencies. How do they find those dependencies?

For example, I'm starting on a fresh Ubuntu server, following directions to install rvm. They provide something like:

sudo apt-get install git-core libreadline5 libncurses5-dev libreadline5-dev build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libpcre3-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev;

I just want to understand how they find all of those dependencies. Copy and pasting works, but I think it's more important to understand it.