I bound it to the wildcard address in the command line arguments when calling the .exe (I'm using Windows). And I already know the localhost address will work. I'm trying to see if the external IP address works. I just wrote a Dockerfile for this and am building it now. Would the same thing happen with a Docker container?

From: Boost-users <boost-users-bounces@lists.boost.org> on behalf of Bill Somerville via Boost-users <boost-users@lists.boost.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2019 3:27 AM
To: boost-users@lists.boost.org
Cc: Bill Somerville
Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Server application won't bind to ports on IP address other than my internal ones

On 11/01/2019 21:42, Osman Zakir via Boost-users wrote:

I built the HTTP server example from Asio and tried to run it. Same problem. I set up port forwarding for port 8080, passed 0.0.0.0 as the address in command line arguments and tried to visit my external IP address in my browser (wrote an HTML page to act as a landing page). Can't reach the app, as with my own server application. So either it's both of the possibilities mentioned before, or just that firewall needs to configured properly. Except it already seems like the firewall is allowing both applications through. Maybe there's something in the configuration that I'm still missing, though.

If you are behind a NAT router then I don't think you can access a service port at the external IP address the NAT is actually doing translation for. To test within the LAN behind the NAT router simply use the local host address, either the loopback if you are on the server host or via the server host LAN address. The port forwarding is only valid for incoming external traffic to the NAT router. This is one good reason why your server should bind to the wildcard address so that you can test it via any of it's host's addresses.

Regards
Bill Somerville.