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Costa Michailidis
Asked: 2013-05-12 15:23:03 +0800 CST

How to inspect localhost from my smartphone?

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Ideally I'd like to expose a port, like 8080 or something, to the web, so that I can run a website on my desktop and inspect it on my smart phone or show it to a client and so on. How do I expose one of my ports to the web in Ubuntu? I am typically working on a home WiFi, I don't have to mess with my router do I?

Any help would rock!

Update:

I use node.js for a server, and when I navigate to 192.168.my.ip:8080, I get a typical error message: 

Unable to connect      
  Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at 173.52.xxx.xxx:8080.
  The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few
    moments.
  If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network
    connection.
  If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure
    that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

When I go to just my ip address, without a port, I'm prompted by my ISP to log in, which implies that there's some kind of firewall?

Update 2:

I figured it out : ) I needed to do some port forwarding and expose one port to TCP traffic. My Router was rejecting all inbound requests, so I needed to create a temporary exception to the rule. Ah, what a lonely productive Saturday night. Bittersweet, mostly bitter.

server

2 Answers

  1. if you just want to access your localhost then, setup a web server like apache and then just go to the local ip of your computer from your smartphone.

    1. install apache with sudo apt-get install apache2.
    2. now put some HTML files in /var/www/
    3. Go to your local-ip of the computer from your smartphone. (you might need to add the file ending to the address like 192.168.0.100/MyWebsite.html)

    If you want to access it from the Internet, then you need a domain name, and a domain service to host it at.

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  2. From the OP's update:

    I figured it out : ) I needed to do some port forwarding and expose one port to TCP traffic. My Router was rejecting all inbound requests, so I needed to create a temporary exception to the rule. Ah, what a lonely productive Saturday night. Bittersweet, mostly bitter.

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