website unavailable from the local network

[flipke]

Hi


Since yesterday we're hosting our new website ourselves. It's a Dell server with Windows 2003 server and IIS 6.0 is running.
The problem is that anyone from the outside world can see our website, only we (from within the local network) don't.

What could be a solution for this?


Tia

flip

 

[Jpoandl]

Because you give very little detail, it is hard to say what the problem is.

However, it sounds like this is a DNS issue. Can you get to the website using the IP address instead of domain name: for example:

http://10.10.1.23

instead of

http://www.companywebsite.com

If you can, you might have a DNS problem. The issue is that your internal DNS name space is identicle to the name your registered on the internet. For example, internal DNS = microsoft.com and your registered domain name on the internet is = microsoft.com.

This would be a problem. You never want to use your registered internet domain name space on your internal network. If you do, you will have the problem you describe.

What happens is that your internal DNS servers believe that they are responsible for lookups for the all of "microsoft.com". So, when you try to connect internaLLY, you don't have an A record for the web site and a connection can not be made. People on the internet try to resolve "microsoft.com" internally first but then thier internal DNS server realizes that it is not authoritive for the lookup zone "microsoft.com" and will forward the request to Internet DNS servers. At that point, the resolution is found.


To perminantly fix this problem, change one of the two domain name spaces(internal domain or Internet domain). or you can add an A record for the server in your internal DNS for this web site.

-later

Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2003

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out

http://www.NJCOMPUTERNETWORKS.com

(Sales@njcomputernetworks.com)

 

[flipke]

One thing's for sure: it is a DNS issue!

But we're not using the same domain name space for the local network and the internet.

On the other hand, we can reach our website if we just use it's ip address.


regards

flip

 

[Jpoandl]

Oh, your DNS is not forwarding to Internet DNS servers. You have to configure forwarding on your internal DNS servers to allow this:

You need to forward your internal DNS servers to use ISP DNS servers for forward lookups.

1) Delete your "." root DNS zone on your DNS servers (If you have an internal "." root zone
2) Right Click your DNS server in DNS manager. Then click Properties. Click the DNS Forwarders tab. Forward to your ISP provided DNS servers.
3) Wait 5 minutes (for replication to other internal DC's)
4) try to resolve the web site again.


Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2003

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out

http://www.NJCOMPUTERNETWORKS.com

(Sales@njcomputernetworks.com)

 

[markdmac]

flipke,

Have your internal clients access the server by

http://servername/websitename

instead of using the FQDN URL. This will give them the "local" path to it.

If this is the default web site for that server then you could just use

http://servername.

You could also enable host headers for the site and add an CNAME record for it and point it to your servers IP. That way users could reference it by a friendly name such as

http://mypage.

Re:

You never want to use your registered internet domain name space on your internal network.

You might want to do this if you were hosting the domain name yourself. If you were not then you would want to create a record in DNS for your

http://WWW.DOMAINNAME.COM

address. Since that is not the case for you no big deal but I just wanted to add to the comment. Note that I have said MIGHT, there are certainly many ways to configure DNS and firewalls to make this not be necessary. I just wanted to point out that it is an option knowing there are a number of small businesses that went this route when they set up their AD a few years back when Microsoft's suggested direction on this was not so clear.

I hope you find this post helpful. Please let me know if it was.

Regards,

Mark

 

[flipke]

Well, we've tried some things here.
First of all, we don't have a '.' root zone in our DNS, but that's not really the question here. The we tried to make our DNS forward to our ISP DNS server, but though I understand the logic behind this all, it just wouldn't work. We still get "The page cannot be displayed".

So what we've tried next is add this cname. Though at first this seems to be a good solution, once we click on a hyperlink at our website we get nothing. Because the hyperlink points at the real name of the website, and our DNS still doesn't know that one.
Actually it is not quite the solution we were looking for, because you get to type in an alias for accessing your site. And we want to access it by typing in the URL everyone does.

Anyway, thanks for the tips.
Maybe we can get to the right solution by excluding potential solutions like we're doing right now


Regards

flip

 

[markdmac]

Add a dns entry for your

http://WWW address

and point it to your server. That should resolve the link problems.

You could also modify the web page to include relative URLs instead of the longer paths.

For example:

Instead of <img src="

http://www.company.com/images/picture.jpg">

you could use <img src="/images/picture.jpg">

That way if you went with a local friendly name as part of your intranet it would still work. If you need to navigate up a level in the file structure you would use "../" like "../images/picture.jpg", make sense?

I hope you find this post helpful. Please let me know if it was.

Regards,

Mark