Hi folks,
I am hoping someone can validate an approach I'm considering. I would normally take more time to test and figure out whether things will work the way I want, but I need to point my company's networking folks in the right direction based on how Drupal will best behave, more quickly than I can reach my own conclusion. So, the question:
I want both internal and external users to access my experimental Drupal site at my company. External users only would be fine, we open the right address through the firewall, and people come in and use the site. However we have internal network users as well. Challenge is, since we're not setting up DNS entries for the site, internal users can't use the same IP address external users will (a firewall 'principle' here - an internal user types a public IP address for a site into a browser, our firewall will attempt to direct them to the outside world, realize that packets are headed outbound but need to be directed inbound, and not route them).
Is the better approach one using the tolerant base url, or should I set up a separate webserver for the internal folks, pointed at the same DB as the external-facing server. I would copy the site from the external-facing server, change settings.php to reflect the internal url, and just let it run there for the internal folks.
I'm hard pressed to think of any reason why either wouldn't work, but it's entirely possible I haven't thought this through (I've been running to meet some content and configuration deadlines, and feel as though I lack perspective).