I run an Ubuntu host and a VirtualBox Debian guest VM running Apache. I want the guest to be as thin as possible, because I'm not going to have to interact with it much (I hope).
Ultimately I want to run several websites out of the VM and set up a separate VM to run an email server using iRedMail.
I have the network adapter in the guest set up to bridged mode.
I deactivated the firewall on the guest VM AND the host (though that shouldn't be necessary in bridged mode). After I get this to work I plan to raise the firewall and just open ports 80 and 443.
I set up the VM to have a fixed IP, so it's the same IP each time I start the VM.
Though I don't think it's relevant I have my ASUS RT-AC1900P router configured to forward port 80 requests to port 80 on the VM (which is visible to the router and other machines on the network).
When I attempt to access the VM website from external machines on my LAN I use the IP of the VM as my URL though later I intend to access it with the domains names.
The website is visible to the host, but not to other machines on the LAN (or the internet).
When I try to access the website on the VM from a machine on the LAN (not the host) I get "The connection has timed out" The weird thing is that I can ping the VM, and it responds just fine, but web requests fail.
I've been working on this for a couple weeks, and I am hung up at this point. I can't find anything on running a public-facing website out of a VM. It's like I'm the first person ever to do it.
<************* Edited to add more clarity ******************>
My old server is a system I kludged together about fifteen years ago is running Debian 9 and has about 4GB RAM. I don't know what processor it's running, and it isn't involved in this experiment. It has a fixed IP, and until a recent unfortunate encounter with iRedMail it was my webserver. Now it's just a file server. It's on a wire.
I have a Windows 7 system that is a low-wattage solid state computer I built that serves as the family TV and is also on a wire. It has 8GB RAM and a Celeron processor. Again all it does is run Netflix and play multi-media from the network file server (see above).
We have a couple government-issued work laptops that don't interact with the rest of the network. One runs over a wire, and the other is wifi.
We have a Roku in the bedroom and an router wired up in the front of the house that serves as an access point.
There's a 4GB box running Ubuntu. I don't know what version it is, but since the processor is a 32-bit version Ubuntu can't be updated beyond a very old version. It connects via wifi, and I only use it for researching projects in my shop.
The box on which I do most of my testing of the web server is a Windows 10 laptop with 8GB RAM and an Intel Core i5 processor. I test using Firefox and Chrome.
The host box is an Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS desktop with 12 GB RAM and an Intel Core i5 processor. It connects with a wire and has a fixed IP as does the guest machine.
Is that enough information to work with? I don't think any of this should have an impact on communication through port 80, but here it is anyway. Thanks in advance