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I just wanted to find out about whether the Cisco firewalls block all incoming connections to the meetinghouse networks. For example, do these preclude the possibility of having any http server accessible from outside?

I am just curious.

I can't say as I've ever seen or heard how they were set up. But I tend to doubt if they'd allow outside connections. Then there's the church policy on webpages.

Maybe I am just falling back on my developer roots but I was thinking more about some form of web application / tools / web services that might assist in my calling rather than some kind of informational website that I know we are not supposed to create. I am just toying with the idea now that I have set up a server computer at the Stake centre. It is primarily for trying to centralise the masses of Genealogy data on CD and DVD onto one Server (but that alone would have been doable with just some kind of Network Attached Storage). I wondered if I could get some more value out of the Server if I could provide some services over the web like a STS Stake Centre console with access to bits and pieces.

It could be a Chicken and Egg problem. It may not be worth trying to get around the problem until I have a specific use or need for such a service but it may not be worth thinking about potential uses of such a facility unless I know I could make it work technically. I know a way of getting around the problem but again it would break policy. It would involve having a second network controller in the Server that connects directly to the router. It would be on the router's network subnet rather than the Firewall's (10.x.x.x) subnet. That connection would be heavily fire-walled to block everything except the services/ports that the server needs to expose. The internal network traffic would all still go through the firewall and the other connection would just be for external incoming connections but either way it breaks the rule of having nothing connected directly to the router except the firewall.