The SO complained that there are websites she can access at work, but not from home. I thought maybe the pages were on the school’s intranet. Does this sound right? Should there be a way for her to access the intranet remotely?
There are some internal work websites that require me to be hard-wired into the college’s network. I can access them at work (but not if I’m logged in through the wireless network) but can’t access at all at home. I can type in the URL but the page never loads.
Web sites located behind a firewall (such as a company intranet) cannot be accessed outside of the firewall. Often such external access is granted by logging into the internal network via secure VPN.
There are multiple reasons an internal URL may not be accessible from the external internet - some may be intentional, some may not be.
Internal DNS names: I have a webserver at home, and my internal DNS name is home - so this is what I use all the time, for speed. Most of these services are still accessible via the internet, but I have to use the correct external DNS name (www.<mydomain>.<tld>).
http vs https: most of my web services are http only with no authentication for the internal network, but https for external access so they are encrypted.
Firewall: I have media-sharing web services that are internal only (I don’t want/need external access to my media files, and I don’t want anybody else to have access to them either). These do not have ports open on the firewall, so they are not accessible from the internet at all without using special tools …
VPN/SSL Tunnel/Remote Access: I have all of these set up - some method of directly connecting to the internal network from the internet as if I was at home. This is usually for secure administrative access. In my case I can VPN, or attach via https to a virtual machine running a desktop on my server - it isn’t fast, but it does work well, and allows system admin and web access that does not run via the work proxy (compressed screen data traverses the proxy, but I doubt they can pick out what I am seeing). I recently fixed the home computer of an employee of our local regional council - their remote/home working solution was similar: a web accessed VPN that connects to a Citrix farm running their desktop session.
So any (or all) of these reasons could apply in the case of the OP. He needs to determine what his SO is trying to access, then determine why those URLs are not available from where he is.