[Zope] Disable local loopback connections

[Tom]

Greetings. I hate computers and especially networks but I love software 
languages and programming. Zope is tolerable as a medium to allow me to 
express creative language use.  Thanks for listening. :-)

BTW, I would like to be able to test my server's connectivity from the 
Internet. Something goofy occasionally happens with the damned 
computer/firewall/network interface/network card, etc. etc. etc... A 
reboot puts things back in order.

(SUSE 10.3 on Intel dtgblah? board)

My server stays up and running but no one can get to it. And I have no 
way of finding out unless I happen to check it myself outside the 
firewall.

Scriptable proxy services are few and far between and unreliable. A 
couple I have found are .6a.nl and freeproxyserver.net which, until 
yesterday, allowed me to send an HTTP request using Python but now 
requires Javascript enabled and I'm certainly not going to mess with 
the Mechanizer Python module or whatever just for this little problem, 
though it may be an interesting module. .6a.nl has reported 
a "bandwidth exceeded" message for a week or so. Or else they're just 
picking on me for sumitting a proxy request every hour on the hour 
(crontab). BTW, you can probably thank me for FreeProxyServer.net 
shutting down their URL request capability :-)

So, I would like to be able to submit a request via the httplib Python 
module and have it _not_ use the local loopback. There must be a way to 
preface a request URL with the gateway or something but I'd have to go 
back to school to figure it out. And I'm tired of school. It's 
expensive and not all instructors are worth their class time.

Anyway, greetings and happy Zoping to you.

-Tom