Fire Walls?

[Senior]

So the time I'm usually online is at work and being a "hi tech" office we have a fire wall on our network (or so I've been led to believe). Anyway I'm just wondering if this will have any effect on trying to view web pages? I think sometimes I'm not seeing everything I would without it...

Anyone?

[MC Hammered]

Depends on how the firewall is setup.

If it is a real firewall or just a router with some pack filtering information programmed into it or whatever.

It can block a page to entire IP address ranges if the person who set it up wants it to do so.

[rawb]

yeah it's possible, it's all based on what it was set up to do by the tech that installed it.

on that note, if it was just an office solution thrown on by someone without a lot of thought, it probably wont be filtering any web or ssl traffic.

[Kraig]

Yeah... I think we are utilizing a Checkpoint Firewall here at work and I can't view anything not business related... with the exception of this site and a few others!

Firewalls will block everything from specific IP ranges to pages with certain keywords/metatags associated with them.

[rawb]

^that's more a proxy server than a firewall. proxies deal more with content and specific site blocking, since they take the pages being served and trun around and serve them to everyone behind the proxy. proxies are good for blocking specific sites or types of content.

most checkpoint firewall products have a built in web proxy.

while proxies deal with incoming traffic on a webpage level, firewalls deal with it on a packet level. firewalls are good for blocking packets and protocols to specific ports, as well as ip ranges and the like, or combinations thereof (only people from this ip range can connect to this port, etc). you can get a firewall to seamlessly act like a proxy as well but the overhead on the server would be just too much to be worth it.

[Chet]

If you're trying to get around the proxy
check out

http://www.sicksigma.co.uk/

it will let you surf anywhere