Using something other than WWW. 1

[jjjax]

Hi, we currently have our public website running on Windows 2000 server using IIS but would like to someway setup a separate site for employees and using something like employees.oursite.com instead of

http://www.oursite.com.

We currently just use a different port and have the employees just add :9999 to the our normal site. Is this something that can be controlled by IIS and/or is this something that we'd have to contact our isp to route employees.oursite.com to us like I think we had to do to get our ftp site to work? Thanks, Joe

 

[Serbtastic]

You can use host headers to have your main site listen on

http://www.oursite.com

and your employee site listen on employees.oursite.com.

You will also need to add a CNAME or A record to DNS for employees.oursite.com, wherever your DNS records are hosted.

 

[jjjax]

Hi, thanks for the reply and it looks like it's working. I did have to contact our isp and they had to update our zonefile. If I could ask a follow up question...when we look at internally, because our gateway is our firewall, we need to put in our internal ip address of our webserver, 192.1.1.250, and when we did our employee site using a different port, we would put in the internal address then the port number like 192.1.1.250:9999 and it would point to the correct site. Question is, how do we do that now? I tried all variations but can't seem to get it. Thanks, Joe

 

[Serbtastic]

If you have an internal DNS server, you would simply add the new site (employees.oursite.com) and IP as an A record.

If not, you are stuck adding an entry to the local hosts file (can be found in C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc on Windows 2000, or C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc on Windows XP).

 

[lgarner]

Your ISP naturally had to create a DNS entry for "employee.site.com", but that probably points to your firewall's public address. How do your internal users resolve names? Do they use the ISP's DNS servers? If so, there's a problem.

You can separate web sites by address, port, name, or any combination of them.

One solution would be to run the internal site on a different IP address and set up a new translation on the firewall, assuming that you have a free public address. Then, the world can use "employee..." or the public IP address, and your internal users can use the address- 192.1.1.250 for the original, 192.1.1.251 for the employee site.

Or, you can run an internal DNS server so that internal users resolve addresses internally. You have the basic components in your server already, it just needs to be set up.

 

[jjjax]

We do have a dns server running and the way it is setup is that the users computers are setup pointing to our dns server 192.1.1.1 then the dns server points to our isp dns information and our gateway point to our firewall. Not too familiar with setting up dns to do resolve these internally so if you can give a little more detail, that would help a lot. We would like to keep it on the same server with the same ip and port if that is possible. The was it's bascially working now as a work around is that when I setup the new site employees.oursite.com under iis, I just pointed it to the same folder that our original employee site with a different port had been setup so we can still access internally by using the ip address and the port, 192.1.1.250:9999, because it points to the same thing but I'd like to just have it so they can just put employees.oursite.com or somehow without the port number. Thanks, Joe

 

[Serbtastic]

What OS is your DNS server running? Also, what DNS server are you using (Microsoft, BIND or other)?

 

[jjjax]

It all microsft windows 2000 server.

 

[Serbtastic]

Start - Programs - Administrative Tools - DNS
Right click on your zone and click New Host
Type employee in the name field, and enter the IP of your IIS server, then click Add Host.

 

[jjjax]

Thanks, but I must be doing something wrong. I did what you suggested and it when I try to browse to employees.outsite.com internally, it doesn't come up at all and I notice it looking for the public ip so it looks like it's going through firewall to search outside the company which is basically the problem we have with our normal site so we just use the internal ip address to browse. I tried using employees.internaldomainname.local, it comes up with the normal site, not employees. But outside the firewall, everything works fine. Thanks again, Joe

 

[Serbtastic]

If you add the host header name employees.internaldomainname.local for the employee site it will work also (assuming employees.internaldomainname.local resolves to the internal IP of the IIS server).

 

[jjjax]

That did it. Thanks for all the help.