I've got a Linux machine as my Internet Gateway, Firewall, WebServer, etc. And also have Win2003 on the internal network, aswell as an XP box. I have a static external IP, and have setup port forwarding to my Win2003 machine running IIS. From my internal network, I can access the Win2003 webserver no probs, but when trying from the Internet, i get connection refused. I have ZoneAlarm installed on the Win2003 server, and see the connections coming in, so it's not my port-forwarding rules on the Linux machine. But even if i disable the ZoneAlarm firewall, i still get the connection refused. as an example, from my XP machine (192.168.1.3), if i use a web browser to view 192.168.1.2 (Win2003) it works fine, but 192.168.1.1:8280 does not. My linux server is 192.168.1.1, and port 8280 has been forwarded to port 80 on 192.168.1.2. Like I say, i see the connections come into Win2003 when trying 192.168.1.1:8280, so i'm sure that's not the cause. Any idea's?

What address are you using when trying to connect from the Internet? If you're using 192.168.1.1, it's not going to work. That's the address of the router's internal interface. To connect from the internet, you would need to use the router's external address.

I'm using my servers external IP, obviously 192.168.1.1 wouldn't work on the net outside of my network. I've had friends try to connect with my external IP, for example... http://82.68.65.3:8280 But still no joy. When I said i tried 192.168.1.1:8280, that was from within my local network, to make sure i went through my Linux server, and got redirected to the Win2003 box.

That is strange. I'm wondering if ZoneAlarm is allowing computers on your local network to access the server because they are in the "trusted network", but denying external computers access because they are not in the trusted network. Maybe try disabling ZoneAlarm altogether, to remove it from the equation.

That's what I thought about the 'Trusted Zone', but that still doesn't answer why, from my XP machine (192.168.1.3) i can access IIS on 192.168.1.2, but not 192.168.1.1:8280. I've disabled ZoneAlarm (was only using it to check that the connection was coming in), the Win2003 firewall is also disabled. So the connection is coming in when port-forwarded by my Linux server, but somehow IIS doesn't like it.