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In the morning this question came across my mind. You would notice my poor knowledge on firewalls. My office installed a new firewall. I am provided a new username and a password. And here we have a login interface. I've searched browser's cookies, HTTP headers and everything, But I cannot figure out where is this login interface hosted. All I can see is www.google.com in address bar of the browser. Whichever site i tried to access, (without having logged in through the firewall) I found this kind of URL www.google.com/abcd/ww/..

Previously we had a known firewall... And t was obvious through the URL https://10.66.28.5:4100/wgcgi.cgi So I knew whats the technology behind that.

But this new One is troubling me. I cannot even guess how this one works. Could You please explain?

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    Are you the administrator of this network? Can you tell us what the brand/model of the device is? And is it really a firewall, or is it a combination firewall/router or perhaps do you mean a proxy server?
    – Mark Henderson
    Jul 9, 2013 at 5:41
  • No, I'm a web developer. Previously there was watchguard xtm proxy has installed. But I haven't got a chance to learn about this new one.
    – Dan Jay
    Jul 9, 2013 at 5:44
  • 4
    Ask your network administrator.
    – user9517
    Jul 9, 2013 at 5:47
  • 3
    I don't think it's possible for anyone but the network administrator to answer this conclusively, since you won't be able to obtain the necessary information from anyone else.
    – Michael Hampton
    Jul 9, 2013 at 5:51
  • 3
    @shan: Put in a call/raise a ticket with your help desk - that's your and their job.
    – user9517
    Jul 9, 2013 at 5:52

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It looks like the new 'firewall' is doing more than just being a firewall. Until you log in it is intercepting and directly answering all web requests with a page of its choosing so that all websites look like they are the login page.

Many internet cafe's and hotels wifi hotspots operate like this, so you can connect to their network for free but not receive internet until you are authorised.

As for general info about firewalls try this wikipedia article

A place to start looking for info on how your new system works try

As for actually inspecting what the system is, before you login try doing what this page says to view the http headers https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4423061/view-http-headers-in-google-chrome and google some of the phrases contained in the header that look to be different to normal websites.

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    "all websites look like they are the login page" Exactly!
    – Dan Jay
    Jul 9, 2013 at 5:52
  • how can I know more about this framework?
    – Dan Jay
    Jul 9, 2013 at 5:52
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    @shan, check out "captive portals". This is the name for the sort of setup you have there.
    – tombull89
    Jul 9, 2013 at 7:32
  • captive portals! can they hide server headers?
    – Dan Jay
    Jul 9, 2013 at 9:43

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