I am using FileMaker Pro 7 on Mac OS X software TRYING to give web access to my coworkers from their home offices to my database.

When I use the "url" that FileMaker gives me in the Instant Web Publishing menu it works fine for ME - but noone else. Someone told me it's because the URL it is giving me is my "local address" or something like that and will not work for anyone outside my "local network".

How do I give the group remote access to both my computer and the database???

Hey there,

we need more info to answer this properly, but it sounds like you are giving them an internal IP address (probably something like 192.168.0.10). This will work fine for other users on your own network, so other PC's in the same building should be able to access.

To access it from outside over the internet, your users will need to know your external IP address (you can try going to www.showmyip.com) and you will have to configure a hole in whatever firewall or router you are using to allow them access. For web this usually means external IP port 80 points to internal IP port 80.

Hope that points you in the right direction!

Cheers... Sean.

Hi, emalee! It sounds like Sean's right..

Many small/home offices today get 1 (usually dynamic) IP address and then use routers to hand out new internal IP addresses to each computer/node on the network. As Sean says, you can probably re-direct web/filemaker traffic to a specific computer on your network by re-configuring the router (there are posts somewhere that talk about this in detail but holler if you can't find them).

Even if you do all this, though, your main IP address will probably change form time to time so it's not going to work consistently. Serving with FM works best with static IP addresses where the server has 1 IP address that is unique on the internet. Something like 257.257.1.12 (fake) is unique whereas 192.168.x.x was designated to be re-used on local networks so there are probably millions of 192.168.1.2 ip addresses out there... but they're only referenced from within the same network.

Hope this helps. Welcome to the forums!

--ST