Personal Web Sharing

Ok, this may sound like a really stupid question but please bare with me...lol

I have set up Personal Web Sharing from system Preferences of Mac OS X.

I then put some documents in the library/webserver/documents folder.

Will the data in that folder be availble to only people in my network or will it be available to anyone in the world by simply pointing their browser to my internal IP Address (e.g. 192.168.3.4)?

This is only available inside your network.

But there is an exception to this, and that only happens when you manualy open port 80 on your modem/router. If you have no idea what I am talking about, this is not applicable for you (hope I spelled that right ).

But I thought that Port 80 is open by default because its the port which is used by HTTP traffic?

Port 80 is only opened on webservers. To open any port below 1024 you need root privileges (this is from my Linux knowledge, don't know the Mac OS X name). That is why outgoing webtraffic (from you to a webserver) is using a random port above 1025, but it is usually above something like 30000.

Ok, so I've done this with my router, can you check if its ok on the pic

If 192.168.1.3 is your internal IP address, then this will make your Personal Web Sharing available to the outside world. They only need to type your IP like it is displayed on http://www.whatismyip.com.

when I typed in my my IP address from the website (http://www.whatismyip.com) it goes to my routers configuration page not my macbook

That's strange. Probably your router has Remote Managment or something like that turned on. You should turn this off to see your Personal Web Sharing documents.

I've checked my router settings and there's nothing enabled relating to remote management or other similar things.

However I have done some research and I have found out this is a common problem amongst some Belkin Routers.

Maybe you should look at the Belkin site to see if there is a firmware update for your router, because this is a rather large problem in my eyes. This simply means that anyone can configure your router as soon as they know your IP address.

Otherwise you could look into moving to another port, for example 8080. The only disadvantage is that you will have to type 1.2.3.4:8080 instead of just 1.2.3.4. This is assuming your IP address is 1.2.3.4/

I downloaded the latest firmware update just a few weeks ago. Nobody can change any settings because it requires a password to make any sort of change...

How do I go about changing the port to 8080?

You can change the portnumber to 8080 by changing the <Inbound Port> to 8080. This way you don't have to change anything on your Mac.

hm...that's weird I changed the inbound port to 8080 then pointed my browser (after clearing cache) to 'Public IP Address:8080/ but it still goes into my router configuration page…

Does the FTP work? If so, try some random port (1234 and 9999 are my favorites) for the HTTP connection.