Network configuration

Congratulations! By now you have the KOBServer software and a web server installed on your computer and working as individual components. Now comes the hard part...getting everything to work together as an integrated system. It's hard for me to give specific configuration instructions that will work for every possible hardware, software, and network combination. Instead, I'll describe in detail how I configured my system, and hopefully that'll be a useful guide on how to configure yours.

The ultimate goal is to make it possible for internet packets to find their way from the KOB user's computer through the network to your server platform, using a symbolic host name such mtc-kob.dyndns.org. Sorting out all the network issues can be quite a challenge, so we'll break it down into four manageable chunks:

• Establish a permanent IP address for the host computer on the local network.
• Configure the host computer's firewall to allow incoming KOB packets.
• Configure the router to direct incoming KOB packets to the correct computer on the local network.
• Set up a DynDNS account to associate a symbolic host name with the server's global IP address.

First, let's assign the host computer a particular IP address on the local network.