Accessing asp. net development server external to VM

Question

Guys, been knocking my head against the desk (instead of the mac) for hours. I'm running VS 2008 in a parallels VM. I can access the development server in the VM if local host is used, if I use the designated ip for the VM or try to access it externally it does not work. All firewalls are off and I verified that I can access iis externally.

Any Ideas what could be wrong?

Lucilucia

Answer 1

I ran into this same problem and am using a TCP tunnel to bypass it. Download this Java app & just tunnel the traffic back. No messing with IIS necessary!

http://jcbserver.uwaterloo.ca/cs436/software/tgui/tcpTunnelGUI.shtml

In command prompt, you'd then run the java app like this... Let's assume you want external access on port 80 and your standard debug environment runs on port 1088...

java -jar tunnel.jar 80 localhost 1088

Sianna

I found that this app would slow down to a crawl after a while until I hit "clear", because it was appending data to the textboxes from every request. So I modified the source to disable the logging and now it works great! – Wildman

Thanks @KevinLaity - I've haven't run it for too long so never had that problem. Mind sharing the updated source for the performance gain? – Sianna

Sure, simply replace the TcpTunnelGui.java file with this: pastebin.com/dizVUmMB and recompile as per the readme file included with the original source. – Wildman

Answer 2

Yes, it is by design. Consider using IIS instead.

Dulcia

Thanks, now I have to get ASP net working on IIS, which was looking hairier than just hitting the aps dev server port externally. Everything installed properly for IIS and ASP .Net but IIS seems to still just server static content properly. Thanks – Lucilucia

Cool- aspnet_regiis will be useful to you. – Dulcia

Answer 3

The first answer is that you can't do it because the development server is specifically made to just run locally, otherwise it becomes a security risk.

The second answer is that you can get around anything, this hints that there is a way to do it using a reverse-proxy (but the post he links to seems to be dead)

Cadaverine

Answer 4

EDIT : After viewing RichardOD's answer, I fear that my answer below is wrong and you can not access it using IP.

But I suggest you to go with deploying it to IIS.

The VS2008 internal web server ( which I guess is cassini ) creates a port for your app and runs a web server for your app on that port. If you want to access it from outside the machine you have to use that port in addition to IP.

Bakehouse

I am using that port, it just does not work. I can swear that we used to do this with 2005. – Lucilucia