Configure hairpinning on Cisco 871 IOS 12.4(15)T4?

Question

I'm a newbie to IOS. In the past I've used consumer routers which seem to have the smarts to automatically route requests to internal hosts addressed by their public name back to the internal network. I think this is called hairpinning.

I need to do that so that an office laptop can access a server on our office network by its public name both from outside the office and inside.

This thing has me stumped but I'm sure it is a piece of cake for a network expert.

Note: We don't have an internal DNS (we only have 4 machines).

Answer 1

Assuming...

1. my understanding of the question is right (please see comment @petrus)

2. and that you are exposing your internal server to the internet using a static nat using something such as:

   (config)# ip nat inside source static PRIVATE-IP PUBLIC-IP extendable

(no PAT, only plain, old and boring static nat) then any DNS reply in which in the payload there is a reference to the PUBLIC-IP (the same used in the static NAT) is going to be re-written to the PRIVATE-IP.

So if the pre-conditions are met (i.e. the use of static NAT) when your users query the external DNS server for your hostname they are going to receive the re-written DNS answer (PRIVATE_IP) and should connect to your server with no issues.

Your external users will be connecting to your server as usual, that is, using the PUBLIC-IP address of your server.

You may want to take a look to the following document: Network address translation of DNS responses

Answer 2

If you're asking, then I'll guess that what bothers you is the NAT (hum, pat actually) configuration.

If so, look at the following example :

ip nat inside source static tcp 172.22.151.10 22 interface FastEthernet1/0 22

This line will forward all incoming request on FastEthernet1/0 (WAN interface), tcp port 22, to the internal host 172.22.151.10, also on tcp port 22.

If you're on the inside, then there is no need for any configuration on the router and you should be able to reach the server directly.