Zen to Zen connection for website

Hi Folks,

I have a Zen connection here at home with a live website on it 24/7. The website works well for the outside world to view and I have tested it from many other Internet connections.

I also have another Zen connection about 20 miles away with a permanent VPN link between the two.

My problem is that the only way I can view the website from the remote Zen connection is to access the webserver using the local IP address on the VPN. If I try to access the website using the public IP address, I get no response.

Which is to be expected, as the VPN means you are effectively on the LAN side of the router where the web server is located.

Solutions
1. If VPN always up, change local hosts to resolve host name of site to the local IP
2. Specific routing entry in router/vpn setup

Yes, Thanks. I understand why the VPN connection works.

But, I still do not understand why it does not work when I use the Public IP address - just as it does from everywhere else on the Internet.

I once read this....

What you need to do its make sure the return traffic also passes through the router, so that the server address can be translated to the outside address on return packets.

Your PC will connect to the External address, the router will change the destination address to the internal address of the server and forward it to the server. The server will respond, using its own address, and as everything is internal it will answer your PC directly. That will come from the server's real address, but your PC will expect it from the external address and ignore it.

Because you don't have loopback enabled on your router.

I do have loopback enabled on my router.

I can view the website, using the WAN address from the DNS servers, on my local PCs here .....
.... but I can not view it from the PCs at the remote Zen site.

I can view the website from anywhere else on the Internet, including PCs on my Entanet connection here at home.

For the record I use DrayTek port forwarding to route the incoming requests on the Public IP address to the LAN address of the server. The return messages from the webserver are sent back to the Draytek router on the Zen Line.