network/routing wonkiness

[Lonni J Friedman]

For years, my home network has experienced a strange routing quirk
which has mystified me.  For reasons that I'd prefer not to bore
anyone with, I won't get into why I'm speaking up about it now.  The
issue is as follows.  I run a web server on my home network, and all
the IP addresses on this network are non-routable (10.xxx.xxx.xx).
That same webserver is accessible over the internet, with a real,
routable (quasi)static IP address.  If any device/system on my home
network attempts to access the webserver, it will timeout & fail 100%
of the time.  However, if I hard code the non-routable static IP of
the webserver in /etc/hosts with the same internet accessible domain
name, then any system on my home network can access the webserver just
fine.  Note, this is *not* a port issue.  I'm able to hit the same
apache server port regardless of whether I'm inside the network, or
out on the internet.

What I'm failing to grasp is why I am seemingly unable to route
traffic from my home network out over the internet, and back to my
webserver.  Either I've got something bizarre misconfigured somewhere,
or there's some law of networking that I'm not grasping.

thanks

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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org