I have a webserver running on my orange network at home. I have configured my SmoothWall server to pass port 80 traffic from the RED network to this server - which works fine from off my network.

However, if I try to connect to the FQDN address (or external IP address) from within my network I get a connection refused error - directly accessing the webserver using the local IP address works fine. nslookup points to the correct IP address for my smoothie server, so the packets should be passed OK to the webserver.

Coincidentally, accessing my email server on the same machine works fine (this is over https)

I am not using any local DNS (to my knowledge )

I have noticed other similar topics, but they appear to be using complex virtual hosts, or ipcop as apposed to SmoothWall.

Sometimes, but not always, there's an issue with what's called "hairpinning"; it's where you're trying to connect to an inside machine from an outside address using a machine on the inside, so the connection "hairpins" at your router and doesn't always work because it doesn't really leave your network.

The only way I ever figured out to get around this was use the local address. I know, it's not the greatest solution, but I've never been able to get it to work right with a www server. Most other servers are fine except www (and VPN connections).

Hmm, don't know what the issue is, but I think I am going to have to do a major rebuild - I now can't connect to the server using the 'local' address having had a play last night (although the external access is still working fine ;-) )