Free tools and services such as XAMPP and DynDNS are an absolute blessing for me particularly when I need to develop my web apps and test them under development mode. Last year, I successfully set my home web server running on XAMPPLite to be accessible via DynDNS so that I could demo a website I developed. Recently, I assisted a friend of mine in setting up another server, but it wasn’t quite as smooth sailing.

I remembered that I only succeeded in setting up my server previously after much scouring in the Web. God knows how many times I tried and re-tried the instructions at DynDNS, even resetting my modem router and network settings of my computer just to be sure.

After combining what I’ve read in the Interwebs and testing the setting out, did I finally manage to get everything up and working. Port forwarding is one of the important things to do, but the way I do it is so much unlike most instructions I read on the web sites.

Using my new HTC Desire HD smartphone (yeah, I FINALLY have an Android phone, yippee!), I made a few screenshots of my web server port forward settings.  If your Internet connection uses dynamic IP, and you use DHCP to assign IP addresses in your local area network, then I hope you find this useful.

Here’s how they look like on my D-Link modem router:-

DynDNS web server port forward + XAMPP VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

(okay, am I the only one who thinks this Windows Live Writer is fricking funny AND cool?! … oh, alright… here’s the screenshots one by one…)

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