Question

Photo of Nissy Trombly

0

Help with install

2

I have just installed Rock RMS on a local hosting computer. I am not an IT person, we have a very small church and I am the only one working on our database issue. I need help connecting Rock to our website so that we can access it from anywhere. I have not found clear instructions on how to make the two connect. The only place I can login right now is on the local hosting computer. I know there is a simple way just haven't been able to figure it out. Thanks so much!

  • Photo of Arran France

    0

    Hey Nissy,

    Installing it on your local computer isn't usually the best way to go! It's possible to make your local computer accessible from the internet (you'd probably want to look up Dynamic DNS) but that definitely isn't something you'd want to be doing!

    Have you considered getting a small Winhost or 3Essentials plan and installing it there?

  • Photo of Nissy Trombly

    0

    Hey Arran, 

    Thanks for the reply. We are a small church without a lot of $$ I have previously worked in another church where we ran Arena off a local DB with no issues, connected to our website.  

    At this church we had a computer donated that met all the requirements for the local server option for Rock, so I have installed everything Server 2012, Sql 2014 and Rock RMS yesterday. Everything works perfectly except accessing it from outside the local host. 

    • Derek Mangrum

      Derek Mangrum

      Hello. It sounds like you have installed Rock on a computer that is just doing Rock (a self-hosting solution). Is that correct? I also assume that you have Internet access at your location. At this point, to make Rock available via the Internet, you will need to modify your firewall so that a public static IP address you control is NATed to the internal, non-routable IP address assigned to your Rock computer. I don't know if your ISP gives you a public static IP address (or small block of public static IPs). If not, you will need to contact them and get that. You will also want to make sure your computer running Rock has a statically-assigned IP address. Creating the public-private IP address mapping (NAT) on your Internet router can then be done. Then, you will need to add a DNS entry in your public DNS record to point 'rock.<yourDomain>.com' (for example) to the public IP address you are NATing to the internal IP address of your Rock server.


      So, there's a bit to it, but it's doable.

      • Arran France

        Arran France

        Nissy, can you confirm if this is a personal computer a server? If it's not a server Derek's advice may well still work but it's not advisable!