Browsing pages from your external IP address internally

[Kalyan]

Hi,

You have a statistic external IP address and you are trying to browse the pages from your website of which you are hosting internally (IE from within the same building behind your ADSL router).

To do this you will have to substitute the external IP address for the local IP address of the machine which hosts the pages or website. By changing the IP address within the URL to the local address you can now see the page / website.

If you however you have a whole site or database hosted this can be a major pain to have to keep change the external IP address or domain name. To get round this you need to make an entry in the Windows host file. This is a text file called hosts.

Note: It does not have a file extension to confirm this.

It is located in ...

C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\  (on Windows XP)

C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\ (on Windows 2000)

The entry will redirect the external IP address or domain (if you have one pointed to this external IP address) to the local internal IP address hosting the pages / website.