Access website hosted over LAN

Question

I am developing a webpage and would like to see how it looks on mobile browsers, preferably the real thing and not some emulator. So I thought of making my locally hosted site available over LAN. I managed to do that and can access it fine over the WLAN from another computer. However if I try the same address on my android-phone on any browsers I've tried so far I just get "Webpage not available". Also tried on IOS and it's the same thing as on Android while it's still working on my other Windows7-computer.

Why is this? How can this be solved? All devices in question access the LAN wirelessly if it matters.

Answer 1

Long story short: I advice you to check if the firewall on your PC allows incoming connections. If it is not such a big security risk, you can also try to deactivate it to run a quick check, just to understand if the FW can be the problem.

I told that because I stumbled upon a very similar problem. I was running a Java based HTTP server on port 8080 on my desktop PC but I was not able to access it through WLAN form my Android mobile. It turned out I had a firewall activated on my PC that was blocking any incoming traffic. It was enough to properly configure the firewall to solve the problem.

Sadly I work with Ubuntu, so I cannot help you with Windows but this is the screenshot of my PC's firewall status. As you can see, I added a rule allowing incoming traffic on TCP port 8080.

After that I was able to access the server running on the PC. As @devopsEMK said, Fing can give you a hand. Here's the screenshot showing you how you can check that the service is actually reachable from the phone.

Answer 2

This could be a DNS problem, Windows machines can easily find other Windows machines on the same network without needing to have explicit entries in the DNS (WINS is the normal way this is done) your Android and iOS devices will be querying DNS (presumably on the wifi router?) for the machine name your website's on, and may not be getting any answer.

It's also possible that your Windows machines are using a different DNS than your mobile clients, possibly because you're on a domain and the Windows boxes are querying an Active Directory integrated DNS server, which may not be the DNS address that DHCP on your wifi is giving out to the mobile clients.

You may also at some point in the past put HOSTS entries on the Windows boxes to point to each other, which you've never done on the mobile clients.

On your Windows boxes, open a Command Prompt and type ipconfig /all pay particular attention to the Host Name, Primary DNS Suffix and all DHCP and DNS server lines.

Firstly from your Android phone try accessing the web server using the fully qualified DNS name of the Windows box, by adding the Host Name and Primary DNS Suffix together, eg if your IPCONFIG gave this:

Windows IP Configuration

   Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : Computer1
   Primary Dns Suffix  . . . . . . . : MyNetwork

...

IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 123.123.123.123 (Preferred)

Try accessing the web page at the servername http://computer1.mynetwork from your mobile devices. If that doesn't work try using the IP address of your windows, like this http://123.123.123.123

If that doesn't work then install an app on your phone that will show the details of your network connection, there are a few different apps that will do this, I use Android System Info (which is possibly overkill for this job, but works) in ASI go to the "System" tab, and expand the "Wifi" section, you should see a DHCP info here, compare the DHCP server address and the DNS server address(es) to the ones you got from your Windows machines, ideally they should match up.

Answer 3

One option is Chrome Remote Debugging, which works through USB. You need Google Chrome both on your PC and Android smartphone, connect the phone to USB and follow the guide here.

You can view websites and also edit them live through Google Chrome Inspect.

Answer 4

I can't say this is the issue reported here but its worth nothing that on some Android devices any URL that contains a dash "-" will fail to load. On those same devices when trying other services, not just a browser, fail as well (ie., loading media through the Android SDK, etc..).

Answer 5

I was having the same issue: I was able to access the site fine over the WLAN from another computer but not from my android phone.
I solved the issue by opening WiFi configs on my phone, then disconnecting (Forget) my current WiFi network and finally connecting again to the same WiFi network (it will prompt again for the password).
After these steps, I was able to access the site fine from my android phone.

Answer 6

In my case in the router settings, "Use Router as DNS" was checked by default. As a result, my Router had assigned an IP address for my Desktop on which the web server was running (which somehow I didn't check and I was trying to use the IP address assigned by my Domain DNS).

So if you are using Wi-Fi when you face these kind of connection issues you should:

1. Login to Router page and check the "Attached Devices" section

2. If it displays both the Desktop(Web server system) and your mobile then your are good to go.

3. Just copy the IP address of Desktop and use it in URL in the mobile browser

Answer 7

Just do it this.. Use your computer ip rather than localhost or 127.0.0.1 Check your mobile and pc already in same domain. use this application to check it. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.overlook.android.fing when open this application you can see your pc ip.if not use above @GAThrawn answer to config ip.

Your computer IP 192.168.1.2 (What ever you have) use it in your mobile phone. type it in your web browser trough the mobile.

Answer 8

If you are working with visual studio then the virtual server will not be accessible by LAN, you have to have IIS configured in that system or equivalent server-like webhosting software (xampp), if you have that then you just need to type the IP address of that machine in your phone browser.