WAMP server on a LAN

Previously I posted about configuring WAMP server on a PC. Now it's time to move another step further, that is to configure the server so that anyone in the LAN can access the server. Luckily I have two PCs at home and a router between them.

So I installed the WAMP server on my desktop computer so that it can become the server in the LAN. I believe that desktop is more powerful and reliable. Now I should be able to connect to my desktop-web-server when I type the IP of the server in my browser, which is basically how the internet works. If we type an IP address it will directly generate a port 80 request on that server. But it was not happening.

I got the HTTP 404 reply, which means the access is forbidden. What does this mean? It means that my browser generates the HTTP request to the IP but I don't have permission to access the web server. I went through the 'httpd.conf' file in my web server to find out what's going on. Then I found out something similar to an Access List inside the file. So I changed it. There were entries,

Deny from all

I changed them to,

Allow from all

Then I tried requesting the IP address through my web browser again. Now I got the reply back, and it was the WAMP sever index page. So the web server can be accessed within the LAN now.

Then, I went one step further, here what i did was, instead of putting,

Allow from all

I typed,

Allow from 192.168.1.3

Note: 192.168.1.3 was my laptop's IP address.

Now only I can access the web server. :) Better security.

Thank you.