IIS and DNS issue: subdomains

[newyorkny]

Hi Guys,

We have a very unresponsive DNS provider, and I need to get rolling on some subdomains. Specifically, I want a secure subdomain to deploy my SSL.

Say my site is foo.fooweb.foo-organization.org

If I go to wildcard DNS, i.e. *.foo.fooweb.foo-organization.org do I simply enter nothing for "headers" in IIS for visitors to resolve the site containing foo.fooweb.foo-organization.org/index.asp ?

Following this train of thought, to resolve my secure site (for instance), I enter "secure" in the headers for a new site, i.e. secure.foo.fooweb.foo-organization.org and that will take vistors to our secure area?

Is wildcard the answer, or do you think I should state our subdomains in the A record, i.e.?

Is my understanding of the options basically correct?

Many thanks in advance for any guidance. NY

 

[pl12987]

I would suggest you be exceedingly careful with this, especially if you are using Windows/IIS.

First of all, any subdomain on the same IP address as the main site requires host headers...that is how the site tells the difference between one site and another.

However, my experience has been that it is very easy for IIS to get confused between foo.com and mysubdomain.foo.com anyway...when they are on the same IP with only the host header to redirect. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

And adding SSL into the equation seems to make it even worse. I have just recovered from a day-long downtime, due in part to a conflict between a newly-installed SSL certificate and an existing subdomain. SSL apparently needs to have only one site and domain on whatever IP it uses.

I don't know if this applies to Apache or other servers...but that's my experience, fwiw.