Accessing non-port 80 sites with a Smoothwall

We had a user who needed to access a site which wasn’t hosted on port 80 and which also wasn’t accessible on port 443.

The site was given out like this – http://www.mydomain.com:8443. This was common some years ago before the availability of http1.1 and it’s support for virtual hosts. Now…not so much.

The problem with this is that we use a Smoothwall here because it has a solid name in the education sector, and it’s proxy setup is solid, but it can be a bit of a brutal beast when it comes to it’s interface and how to make changes so it took me a bit of hunting to work out how to allow this setup.

1. Go to Web proxy > Web proxy > Settings > Advanced > Web filter options > Allow access to web servers on these additional ports.
   
2. Add the ports there that you want to allow, in our case 8443, and hit enter, then save. You might need to reload the proxy but this shouldn’t be a huge problem.