Ubuntu on Lion under VirtualBox (5)

In the last post we set up our Apache server running in Ubuntu under VirtualBox to serve pages to the host OS (OS X Lion). The next step was to check it works from another machine running on my wireless network, which it does.

http://10.0.1.2:8080
http://10.0.1.2:8080/cgi-bin/test.py

Now, I want to try it from the internet. At least that's what I think I'm doing. I google "ip address" and get XX.XXX.XX.XXX (obfuscated)

which I actually recognize because, although it's supposed to be dynamic, it never changes. Now if I do say:

http://XX.XXX.XX.XXX:8080

Safari complains that it can't connect to the server. What we need to do is turn on port forwarding for the Airport, as shown in these screenshots.

Now it works.

(Thanks to this reader's comment).

I'm going to turn this off for now, until I learn more about security in Apache, though I am curious to know how long it would take for a black hat to find me.