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Have you ever had a web application that you wanted to allow anonymous access to inside the firewall, but outside the firewall you wanted to require passwords? With the access control list of the database, you can generally only allow it one way or the other. Well, I'm going to show you an easy way how to accomplish this and allow both.

Let's say you have an internal news or intranet-type web site in Domino. You allow anonymous users to read the site through a web browser without having to log in. They just go to the website's URL and can see all of the information. It's a convenient way for users to get all of the latest company info, especially if you make it the default homepage in your user's browser.

Now lets say you have a mobile workforce that doesn't really have access to a virtual private networking (VPN) inside your environment. They want access to the same information, but obviously you don't want to allow that information just to be open to anonymous access from outside the company. Anyone hitting this website from outside of your internal network should be required to log in.

This can be done by harnessing the power of replication and a few tweaks to your environment.

Setting up the databases

Assuming you already have the website working internally with anonymous access, what you need to do next is find another Domino server in your environment that can be accessed via the internet. This server will generally be in your network's DMZ (de-militarized zone).

This additional server will be hosting a replica of the website application. So now you'll have two servers, one inside and one outside the firewall and a replica of the web application on both. For ease of explanation, I will call the servers the following:

insideserver/ACME
outsideserver/ACME

The insideserver/ACME will be where the application can be accessed anonymously and outsideserver/ACME is where the application will require authentication.

Both of the applications will answer to the same URL. So that's the first thing we'll have to set up.

Setting up the website document

We want the application to be easy to use for the end user. They don't need to know whether they are accessing it on the inside or outside server, they just need to type in the same thing using their web browser either way.

So let's make the URL webapp.acme.com. To do that, we'll have to set up a website document like I showed you how to do last September.

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