Networking Overview

To access the web software that you installed in your antlet, no configuration is necessary! Just navigate to http://antletX.local, where X is the last number of the antlet’s IP address. To access the antlet with IP address 10.1.1.42, e.g., just navigate to http://antlet42.local.

However, this will only work inside your local home network. The rest of this page will show you how to configure access to your antlets from the outside world.

There are three address spaces involved. See the diagram below. The Internet address space, shown in red in the diagram, uses IP adresses that are publicly accessible on the Internet. A remote user of the software in your antlets, called Alice in the diagram, is shown on top. The requests she sends find their way through the Internet to your home router.

Your router translates the Internet address space to a private address space, called a subnet, that is used to address devices in your home network. Common subnets used by router are 192.168.1.x or 192.168.0.x. By configuring port forwarding inside your router, the requests that Alice sent can find their way not only to your home router, but also onwards to your antsle. In case you only want local access from inside your home network (shown as "You" in the diagram), you don't need any port forwarding in your router.

In order for Alice's request to finally reach a specific antlet, you can configure the nginx reverse proxy that comes with edgeLinux. This will work for "web" antlets, using HTTP or HTTPS. In case of non-HTTP antlets, you can configure a libvirt forward to send the incoming requests to the specific antlets that will handle them.

Please read Accessing antlets by domain name in order to get your web-based antlet accessible from the outside world.