[fi-rg] Web Services Firewall Issues

[Leon Gommans]

Hallo Frank,

Gian Luca and I are going through your usecase contribution and trying 
to understand the issues
with mapping a internal to external EPR's using a SOAP proxy firewall.

Assuming HTTP is the protocol carrying SOAP messages:

Refering to our latest version of the document which was put on the list
is it correct that the firewall in fig 6. does not allow any HTTP 
traffic to go thru,
ie. port 80 is blocked.

Assuming  the RFC2616 construction of a HTTP URI:
http_URL = "http:" "//" host [ ":" port ] [ abs_path [ "?" query ]]

A SOAP proxy will receive a request for resource addressed by abs_path 
on its external address
defined by host[":"port], which it must subsequently forward (preferably 
unaltered, but after doing its policy
checks) to an internal Application Server. It must then know to which 
internal hosts the request addressed to abs_path
must be forwarded to. Also the internal host address can not be the same 
as the external addres (or is there some DNS trick you can play?)
Is this essentially the problem you are describing ?

How are existing SOAP proxy's configured to do such mapping? Is this 
something you statically configure ?
Is this something we want to make more dynamic ?

Thanks .. kind regards .. Leon.