virtualbox.org

I run Virtualbox on a windows 2008 host.
I am running a turnkeylinux Wordpress appliance as a Guest, using a static IP and Bridged networking.
From inside my network, I can readily access the site by adjusting hosts file to have the domain name match the ip of the guest machine.
no problems there. Runs like a dream. Once I port forward on my modem/router ports 80 and 443 to the guest ip, it works from outside the network. sometimes.

Thats the problem. It works perfectly about 75% of the time, other times it just sits there and says Waiting for xxxx(websitename)xxx It doesnt time out, no errors nothing, just says "connecting" in the tab, and Waiting for... in the status bar. If I refresh it can come back immediately, or just continue waiting. Happens on all browsers, and monitoring tools seem to validate this so it isnt specific to me just being on a "bad" outside network. Its really random from what I can tell.

At this point, since it seems to work great INSIDE the LAN at all times, but outside the LAN is flaky, I am ruling out problems with the virtual machine, its guest OS and wordpress config.
This leaves me thinking there is some sort of issue with the port forwarding on my router (actiontec Q1000) or with the bridged network driver interfacing with outside ip addresses.

If I run the 'old' version of the site directly from host server, and port forward to its real ip address, everything works, but I really want to have this migrated onto a linux virtual machine for many reasons.

Does anyone have ANY idea how I can narrow this down and get this corrected? at this point im not above building some sort of router out of old pc hardware if I knew how and if it would make a difference.

I lean toward the port forward in the router simply because you say it works local even when it fails from the cloud.
You could try to use standard network tools to see where it is stopping, when it is failing.

Tracing route to mywebsite [209.181.64.130]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 5 ms 4 ms 1 ms 10.200.66.1
2 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 66.227.90.132
3 5 ms 2 ms 2 ms [65.120.178.157]
4 * * 7 ms [67.14.15.186]
5 3 ms 8 ms 6 ms [71.217.188.14]

6 29 ms 29 ms 32 ms notmywebsite [209.181.64.130]


The static ip that centurylink gave me is ending up with a ftp site that is not related to me at all.... is this possibly a ip address conflict?

That or your provider is intentionally jacking with standard ports to keep you from having a presence on a residential line.
Switch to non-traditional ports and see if it helps.

how would i switch to non traditional ports, Im unfortunately not familiar with how to do that

Standard http/https ports are 80/8080 pick two that are not used and set the web server to it.

I dont know, I think that might be a red herring, If provider was trying to screw with me why would it work fine when I switch back to a physical server with a physical ethernet port.

I am thinking about activating the second ethernet port on the server, and routing the vbox to it,and plugging that into a port on the router, think that may help any?

The only way you will get real answers to this is to put some network sniffing tool on your "client", the host AND guest, and see what's actually coming in and what's send back. Wireshark per example.
At that point, you'll be able to see where the packets are dropped. Only after that, you can start digging as of why.