How to access Django web server on Fedora 17 guest from host/Mac OS X browser

Hi,

As a designer and front-end developer, I'm no networking genius and it took me forever to get this working. A client of mine needed to install a Django build and decided the easiest way was to setup a Fedora 17 VM on my mac and put all of their "stuff" in that place instead of commingling all the dependent libraries etc with my mac (not to mention, constant imagemagick problems on my mac).

Anyhow, my goal was to be able to run the Django website from my mac's safari or chrome browser (the host) - I needed to do CSS coding work and lots of cross-browser checking. Here is how I got the Django guest web server to open itself up to the outside world.

I am running Parallels 7 with Mac OS 10.7. I have no other use for this VM except to run Django.

1) In terms of the Parallels menus and overall VM settings, the default Network setting of "Shared networking" seems to work fine. (I think this is the default; I didn't install the VM myself incidentally.)
2) Open up the Firewall Configuration in Fedora. On the Trusted Services tab, enable the service www (http). I believe all other settings can be left alone/defaulted. Be sure to hit "Apply."
3) Run the app using port 80. For me, I had to first SU - change myself to a root user to allow me to use port 80 - and then run the app (hat tip: stack overflow) :
python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:80

4) From another terminal inside the Fedora VM, we need to figure out where the Django webserver is running (what IP address). type:
ifconfig

The output near the top will show something like this:

eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 10.211.55.4 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.211.55.255
inet6 fdb2:2c26:f4e4:0:21c:42ff:fe0d:bd4a prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x0<global>

5) Where it says "inet" in the output is the IP address of the webserver: 10.211.55.4 . Type that into your Mac browser, and the guest/Fedora/Django website should load.

hope that helps!
brian