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I have a virtual LAMP machine set up with 32-bit CentOS 5.5 running on VMWare Player. It's being hosted on a Win 7 64-bit machine running a bridged network connection. Everything seems OK on the guest OS, as I can navigate to http://localhost and get the CentOS Apache 2 test page. However, I can not access the web server from a browser on the host OS through the IP address of the guest OS, which is the point of setting this up in the first place. I can successfully ping from host to guest (there is no firewall on the guest OS) too.

The image file for CentOS was downloaded from here (only used part 1 of 2):


So is this something weird in the Apache conf or some hidden setting I'm missing in VMWare Player?

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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I ran into this recently, and it turned out to be a firewall issue. The default iptables blocked any incoming port (except ssh).

Here's an intro on iptables if you're not familiar with it: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Network/IPTables

And you need to make sure to at least allow port 80 incoming.

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Yes, this has caught me before with CentOS - very annoying! –  Linker3000 Jun 27 '11 at 20:17
+1 for you buddy! you belong to ServerFault world :) I am a developer so server stuff is not in top of my mind when it comes to IPTables, etc even though I know what it is. I digged through VMWare kb, support and ServerFault, none pointed this setting as far as my search goes. More power to you! –  Thale Jul 1 '13 at 11:42
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This is a firewall issue, so if you want to fix it quickly then temporarily stop iptables by giving the following command:

service iptables stop

Then check by running apache in host browser.

You can also add port 80 and 443 to iptables:


Do that before commit and restart service. This way you can keep the firewall running and allow these to be be pinged from outside.

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This firewall issue can be fixed easily via webmin.

Just open


Then navigate to Networking → Linux Firewall. Then you should add a rule or edit one of predefined rules (like the one for 22 port) and save. At last click on Apply Configuration button.

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