(silly confusion) how to access my http:// IP ADDRESS

Any website on the internet such as whatismyip.com is only going to be able to see the router device from your ISP service. That is not the same as your computer. Your router then "routes" connections from the internet to your computer. Normally, it only does this for connections that your computer has already initiated. Otherwise, you would have the whole world trying to hack your computer.

You should be able to configure your router to accept unsolicited requests from the internet. This is an inherently dangerous configuration. But if you want to host any kind of data from your Mac, you have no other option. The safer option is to configure just one or two specific ports and send that unsolicited data to your Mac. There is also a "DMZ" option to forward all connections to your computer. I don't recommend that option.

I actually don't recommend any of these options. It is much better to use existing services like iCloud to share any of this data. Then you have professional network engineers securing your data. Those servers never go down (relatively speaking) and you never have problems with them.

What is it that you are trying to achieve? Are you trying to run a web server from your mac?

And why 8080 specifically?

The IP address that you get from the whatsmyip site is the public IP address of your router. If you want to access your mac from outside, you will have to set up your router to send accesses to a specific port number (80, or 8080 or whatever) to the local IP address of your Mac.

It's hard to do all this if you are not sure of what you actually want to do.

Please clarify.

Darkstarx70 wrote:

I only wanted to setup a photoshare... that does not imply anything bad to begin with.. since mine is already on a the local network, I need my sister and her husband to add my pictures to their printed Facebook studies. or at least browse a little and see if they like that.

It seems that you are out of your depth here.

To do what you describe, you would first need to set up a web server in your mac (not difficult, but not trivial either), then reroute the respective port at your router; and, besides that, there is no guarantee that the public IP address that your ISP hands to your router will always be the same. To have everything covered, you'd also need to setup a dynamic dns, using a service dyndns or myip, so that you could use a domain name instead of a numeric IP address.

Quite a lot of work, for something that an online service like iCloud Photo Sharing, could do in a minute and, as noted, with far better security and better interface.

Darkstarx70 wrote:

I only wanted to setup a photoshare... that does not imply anything bad to begin with.. since mine is already on a the local network, I need my sister and her husband to add my pictures to their printed Facebook studies. or at least browse a little and see if they like that.

If you want to configure and host a local server with photos available to the internet, welcome to the deep end of the proverbial pool.

Running a server computer is different and is more involved than is running a client computer.

This photo-hosting configuration (with a firewall and a private network involved) inherently involves port forwarding, mapping IP addresses, running a web server or file server, quite probably DNS, and dealing with and preferably avoiding the shenanigans that target any server connected on the ‘net; both networking, and security.

iCloud Photos includes photo sharing, if you are using iCloud Photos. (Or some other photo-hosting service.) This entirely avoids running your own photo server, too.

Here is: How to use iCloud Shared Photo Library - Apple Support

Some network-attached storage (NAS) boxes can also host photo galleries, but I’m somewhat skeptical about exposing any NAS to the ‘net. Particularly one with other data or other services in use locally. And that typically still involves port forwarding and the rest.

Your local IP address is 127.0.0.1, among other addresses.

On a private network, your external or public IP address these services return is the IP address of your firewall. Not of your local Mac or NAS or whatever other server box you’re using behind the firewall.

If you’re trying to expose your server or NAS to the whole of the internet, and your server will get probed, it will get targeted, and potential latent issues and vulnerabilities will get checked, then you will need configure port forwarding through your firewall into your server, and map he incoming connection into your server. Basically, exposing a server gets multiple free vulnerability checks, but you won’t get the report.

Put differently, you will need to provide a direct path in through your firewall for untrusted and potentially malicious users (which means either dynamic DNS or a static IP and static DNS, and port forwarding TCP port 80 and TCP port 443 on the firewall), and if the miscreants do manage to breach the server—which can happen from time to time—they’re then operating directly on your server, and with the rest of its contents. And quite possibly then with the rest of your local network. (I usually prefer using a so-called DMZ configuration, to isolate a potential breach. Fixing exploited one server is a whole lot less work than potentially fixing everything else on a local network that might not have been maintained entirely up to date and entirely securely.)

Your external address would be your IP address followed by whatever local path in the server. You can set up dynamic DNS (DDNS) to map to that, or can get a fixed (static) IP address from your ISP and can then use traditional DNS. DDNS works best when the firewall supports that, too.

Say that web service returned 198.51.100.11 as your public IP address. With port forwarding enabled on the firewall, he path to your server would be http://198.51.100.11/rest/of/path and https://198.51.100.11/rest/of/path — the rest of the path is determined by your web server, and your picture folder would have to be configured within whatever web server you’re using here.

The OzoneLord-2026 stuff is a local mDNS / Bonjour / ZeroConf network name, and is not available publicly; outside your firewall.

Some ISPs also block some network traffic on residential (dynamic) service tier, as well.

I’d suggest using iCloud Photos picture hosting, or using some other not-local service. I would not recommend exposing a Mac or a NAS to the internet. Not unless you want to learn a whole lot about networking, IP routing, port forwarding, web servers, and security, that is. Because you will learn about all that, and more.

FWIW, “stealth” is a poor settings choice. It doesn’t prevent what it claims to, though it does detune IP routing.