DNS issue/question

[ScottWIT]

It's been brought to my attention that if we ping our domain name minus the "www" we are getting a reply from the private IP address of our exchange server. I've also been told that images are not getting loaded to our website and that there might be a connection there. I can't figure out why this would be because I checked the easycgi control panel (they host our website/domain) and I didn't see anything that looked incorrect to me. I also checked the DNS records on our DNS server and I do see that for the Host(A) record it lists the IP address of our exchange server which to me doesn't seem right. Shouldn't that be the IP address of the DNS server? I took over for the the old Network Admin a few months ago so I didn't set it up that way but that seems odd to me. What is the difference between the host(A) DNS record and the name server(NS) DNS record?

 

[brianinms]

Let me take a guess that your organization has the same private domain as well as public domain. Such as your active directory domain is abc123.com and your webpage is abc123.com. Your exchange box is prolly listed as an NS as it is also running active directory.

 

[ScottWIT]

Correct, public and private domains are the same and yes the exchange server does have AD on it. However, the only NS listed is our DNS server. The first DNS record listed though is a host (A) record with the private IP address of our exchange server and it lists "same as parent folder"... but wouldn't the parent folder apply to the DNS server and not the exchange server?

 

[Cstorms]

same as parent implies your zone name, so by default if you ping your site.com name it will return with a reply of the ip address for that zone, if you wanted it to be only pinging exchange you would put exchange in for the name for the record once you name it, therefore it wouldnt be using the "same as parent" name, it would be, exchange.parentname.com, so if you have a static ip configured for your zone given to you by your ISP and you are pinging it internally (i.e. 66.11.22.33) the A record that has been configured for whoever is authoritative for that zone yoursite.com (something like godaddy), would have the 66.11.22.33 ip and if you ever pinged it without using lower level A records that you configured (like www) it would return whatever ip your host has setup in their zone.

Cory

 

[Cstorms]

I spose I should answer at least one of the questions, the difference between an A record and an NS record is the NS record specifies which machine by corresponding IP is authoritative for the zones hosted on the dns server, so if you hosted your AD zones on a machine named DC1 and its ip was 10.0.0.0 this would in turn reflect what would be listed in your NS record, an A record the name of a machine and its corresponding IP within that zone which is hosted by the Name Server. HTH

Cory

 

[lhuegele]

Your private network should never have been set-up as the same domain as your external domain. Since it is though, what you are looking at is having internal DNS records that are different than your external DNS records.

The reason you must use the

http://www internally

is because otherwise, you won't reach your external website because domain.com refers to your internal network when you are inside your network. If your external DNS records are set-up properly, typing domain.com from outside your private network should result in your website coming up.

Train your users to always use the www, or change your internal domain to be something OTHER than your external domain. I suggest the first option is the easiest.

Good luck,