The connection was refused when attempting to contact....

Here is my network configuration.

Someone in the wide world trying to contact my computer:

my public ip -> nats to an internal 10 address that is set on my router -> nats to a 192 address that is set on my computer

My problem:

When I try to browse my website (via my public ip) from outside my network everything works fine.

When I try to browse my website (via my public ip) from my computer, I get the message "The connection was refused when attempting to contact xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx".

If I connect to my website via "localhost", I can access the web server, but not all of my applications work properly. There is one application that requires complete url paths.

If I set the paths up to use localhost, then the site works fine internall when I connect via localhost, but the site does not work externally for someone trying to connect to my public ip.

If I set the paths up to use my public ip, then the site works fine for external users, but not when I try to connect via localhost.

If I try to type my own ip address in my browser, the connection is denied.

I am pretty sure the problem has to do with how my whole NAT structure is set up, but I am not sure how to troubleshoot it.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

I'm not entirely sure about what I'm about to say, but I think that it is impossible to access your internal site using your external address. It looks to me like you have setup your network correctly. The way I would solve this, but it may not be what you want, would be to use domain names, rather than IP addresses, to browse the site. You could then setup a local DNS server which handled the domain internally, and you'd need to register the same domain for use externally.

perhaps a local LMhosts file with the correct #pre entry for the server name and ip address would solve this issue.

Found the answer but it was none of the above. Turns out that the problem only occurs when I have a VPN connection initiated to my workplace. Turn of the VPN - everything works fine. Doh!