Why doesn't my virtual host on my VM respond?

Question

I am running CentOS 6.6 as VM on VirtualBox with NAT enabled. I also have a zeus web server running on the VM. Setup is the following.

Host =====SSH====== VM  ========= Web Server
MacOS          CentOS 6.6            Zeus

With port forwarding, I can ssh into the VM(port22) and I can access the admin page of zeus web server(port9090). However, when I try to port forward arbitrary numbers like 8080 for a website, browser access or wget don't work.

Host-Port    VM-Port      Connection
2222           22           Works fine
9090          9090          Works fine
8080          8080             ??

I tried using ncat to isolate if the issue stems from zeus web server or port forwarding but the result seems to be a port forwarding issue.

$sudo ncat -lk 9090
GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Wget/1.18 (darwin15.5.0)
$sudo ncat -lk 8080
#nothing

What should be my next troubleshooting step and does anyone know what I might be doing wrong?

Answer 1

The issue was caused by linux firewall and zeus configuration. I commented out the one-line that was rejecting all tcp packets for the accept-by-default policy

$sudo cat /etc/sysconfig/iptables
# Firewall configuration written by system-config-firewall
# Manual customization of this file is not recommended.
*filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
-A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p icmp -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
#-A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited            #<---THIS ONE
#-A FORWARD -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited\
COMMIT

Then I also changed the Zeus virtual host settings from the follwoing

before
Host Name:127.0.0.1
Alias:

after
Host Name:10.0.2.15
Alias:localhost

10.0.2.15 is the ip address set in the VM by the NAT.

Now I can access the basic index.html on virtual host by typing http://localhost:8080 on my browser