Figuring out how to get WordPress functional not only on the internet but in my house has been frustrating.  One of the main issues is that WordPress is required to know its path (https://teamjuchems.com/wordpress, for example) and will always redirect client access to that name.

This doesn’t sound like a biggy, but it becomes an major annoyance when your gateway device refuses to loopback your internal requests.  This happens because the world DNS servers hand you back your external IP address and your gateway device says “hey, that’s right here!” and parks your browser.  And just like that you can’t get to any of your self-hosted websites from inside your house.

This is particularly annoying with a blog.

One answer is to setup DNS inside your home so that you use as an authoritative source for your internal websites.  Bind and MS DNS both work and depending on your resources are free/cheap.  I’ll be setting MS DNS shortly, but I’d also like to see what I can get running on Linux – that’ll present a more of a learning opportunity.

As far as solving the internal resolution issue, this allows for computers in the house to use the internal 192 address while allowing for world users to hit the external IP while keeping WordPress happy.

A good future blog post might a walk through on hosting a website from your house.  I am sure its been done a thousand times before, but it sounds like a good challenge.  Pretty soon I am going to need to figure out how to backup the mysql database for this blog.  If I lost it now, I would probably let this whole project die…

–Nat