Accessing confluence from a local laptop

[nicholas wade]

I want to be able to access Confluence from my laptop.

Confluence is installed on my PC with default settings (localhost:8090)

If I change the configuration address of Confluence from localhost:8090 to 192.168.0.8:8090 (the address of my PC running Confluence on it) the address is not recognised in the laptop browser.

I have tried additionally altering the system.xml to reflect the different address.

As an experiment, I installed XAMP on the same PC (as Confluence) and can easily access that from my laptop.

I realise that localhost is a special address but surely it should be easy enough to change this and then access Confluence from another machine on the same LAN?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The usual problem is the firewall - user machines are not generally expected to run services, so firewalls default to blocking external access (i.e. any route other than "localhost")

You shouldn't need to change the system.xml, it's not Confluence that is failing here, it's your network settings trying to protect you! Of course, it might not be a firewall too - dodgy routing or some other things can interfere with network connectivity. But I'd start by checking the firewall. At the very least, you need to enable TCP coming in over port 8090

Also, try a "netstat -plant" if you're on a Unix like machine to see what the machine seems to be listening to.

[nicholas wade]

Correct-a-mundo! Spot on, it was the firewall. I had turned my Avast software firewall etc off but Windows 7 firewall was on.

It must be that :8080 links are allowed by default and :8090 links need to be configured.

Many thanks