At the Support Desk we’ve encountered a number of cases where Local admins report that they are unable to see certain parts of their site, or find that some functions of the website seem not to operate from inside their offices, yet when these problems are tested from outside the Local's offices, there is no trouble at all.

We’ve determined that the reason this happens is linked to the Local’s internal network configuration. Most often this occurs when the Local's internal network name is the same as the Local’s web address. Although this frequently is reported to us as an error in the SWEB framework, the error is not something wrong with SWEB; however, we do have some tips for fixing this.

Try this test to see if your network is configured properly:

1. Pull up your site.
2. Now try to pull your site up without using 'www' in the address.

If there is an error or you don't get your site when you don't use www, then your local network is likely not configured properly. You'll need to contact your local networking folks and direct them to this blog or our Support team.

A website should always be available when www is used with the domain, or when www is not used. So http://seiu4321.org should always bring up the same website as http://www.seiu4321.org.

What's happening for Locals that have this problem is that their network is set to send anything using www in the web address to a location outside their local network (consequently, http://www.seiu4321.org works), but because the domain name and the local network have the same name, any traffic not using www is assumed by the network to be internal. Consequently http://seiu4321.org does not work.

This is the reason users may get a 404 error internally, and it has been linked to a number of other odd behaviors as well, such as seeing only gray squares in the Photo Gallery, having links to blog entries not work properly, and more.

In cases where this is happening, the local network administrator will need to ensure that both the www hostname *and* the wildcard for the domain are both pointed at the external IP address of the website. We in Support can provide all of the necessary information, should there be any questions. Feel free to contact us for more details.