I followed the guide for CentOS4.6 server setup. I have a couple of questions, mostly related to networking aspects. First, on page three it states 'do this to create the virtual interface' and provides the instructions. What exactly does this step do? Is it necessary? I tried to look up details regarding virtual interfaces but couldn't find anything that explained what was going on. The closest I got was it allows you to listen on multiple IP addresses, but this doesn't seem like a required step. I'm just not sure, as the guide didn't describe this part. Other than that, my main question is how to access my server from elsewhere. It is a testing server and I am the only person that needs to access it. It's installed in a VM. Right now I gave it a static IP 192.168.0.50. VM is set to bridge, so it passes CentOS directly to my physical router. My host computer is 192.168.0.100, and I can open a browser on my host and type 192.168.0.50 and it brings up the Apache page for CentOS. Things seem ok. Is there a way to configure it so I can type in something other than an IP to bring up that page? Ideally I would type in a URL as I would on any website, although I'm not sure if that is possible since I'm not sure how the host browser would know when to search the local network or when to look in DNS servers for the correct (live) server. My main goal is to set up CentOS as a testing server for my live site. I could always browse it like 192.168.0.50/index.php I believe, and that should work. The only problem I'm having now is when I try that I get a 403 forbidden error. Happens for .html files as well. Strange, because it worked yesterday when I installed phpMyAdmin, but now I cannot access that either (same error). I'm not sure if I reverted to a snapshot I had before making some important changes, or if I changed something else. No idea.
This step is totally optional. It shows how to add additional IP addresses to a network interface if you need more than one IP address. You can get a hostname from dyndns.org and configure your router to update this hostname whenever your public IP changes. Then you must tell your router to forward all needed ports (e.g. 22, 25, 80, 110, ...) to your Linux server. You can then access your server from outside by using the dyndns address.
