DNS issues...

J

joecool234

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 1, 2001
Messages
433
My company just signed up for hosting services with 1and1.com. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of registering the same domain name as the name of our Windows Server 2003 domain. So basically everytime we access the website from a computer within the intranet, IE tries to point to the internal domain. From home I can access the website just fine. Just to sum things up a bit:

We registered mycompany.com with 1and1.com
The name of our Windows intranet domain is mycompany.com
From a computer on the intranet, http://www.mycompany.com generates an error
From a computer at home, http://www.mycompany.com points to the correct website
If i ping www.mycompany.com from a computer on the intranet, it cant resolve the name
If i ping www.mycompany.com from home, it returns the IP address of the web host

Obviously this is a DNS issue. Is there anyway I can trick the Windows 2003 DNS server to forward all requests to mycompany.com to the 1and1.com webserver? FYI, we do not have exchange configured or even a website on the intranet domain. It is simply configured as a Domain Controller. Thanks guys.
 
I'm no expert on this, but I'll give it a try:

Can you set up the external domain to respond to www.domain.com and domain.com. That way external users can access it both ways. In addition when an internal user (on the intranet) types in www.domain.com they should get the external server since the internal server is only setup to respond to domain.com. I am basing this a bit off of VHOSTS on Apaches, so again, this may not work.

This may or may not work in your situation. At my company we do not use suffixes for internal servers, which makes things easier for the network/domain admins.
 
I honestly have no idea how to tell my Server 2003 Domain Controller not to respond to www.domain.com. And I apologize for the error, but we do have IIS setup for Windows Software Updates Services. Maybe this is creating even more confusion. I am currently on the phone with 1and1 tech support, but they aren't being too helpful. I guess I will post a link to this thread in the networking forum as well.
 
Basically what is happening is your local DNS hosts for all local machines and domains. When you create a domain in Windows Server it creates a DNS entry for the domain that you created (ex: mydomain.com). Typically any DNS request from within the network gets taken care of by your local DNS server. Depending on configuration, if the local server does not know of the IP address of the requested name then it should forward to the outside (i.e.: ISP DNS), But when a computer from inside the LAN makes a request it immediately gets resolved to the AD domain. Local DNS knows that it exists and returns the IP of the domain, and that would be the end of the DNS request.

First of all, typically you do not want to setup your domain with the same name as your internet name.

1&1 is not going to be able to help you on this one. This is something that will need to be fixed internally. To my knoweledge there is no way to just point to your actuall website in AD. If you did that all requests from the LAN to AD would be going to your website.

The question is: how do you fix this? I am not sure how to fix this without reloading AD. That being said, I am sure that it can be done without reloading AD.

Hope this helps a little bit. I am sure some of the guys here have a fix for this.
 
here is an idea

go to your local DNS

Add a new record yourwebpage.net and in there put the IP of the .com site

now when people inside the network type the URL of your webpage and put .net instead of .com the DNS will resolve the IP and direct them to the .com webpage

;)
 
Thank god...someone is finally on the same page as me here. Thank you for summarizing my issue so precisely. Yeah, I just got off the phone with a 1&1 tech from India that repeatedly continued to tell me he can access the website just fine. So much for that. I totally agree that both domains should have different names...but I am just an employee after all (my opinions dont really matter much here). There has to be a way to forward requests to the www portion of the domain to an external name server. I'm almost positive this was implemented on another network I have previously worked at.
 
Jay_oasis said:
here is an idea

go to your local DNS

Add a new record yourwebpage.net and in there put the IP of the .com site

now when people inside the network type the URL of your webpage and put .net instead of .com the DNS will resolve the IP and direct them to the .com webpage

;)
Click to expand...

not think this would work?
 
I apologize for the earlier comment...it was directed to the f'in useless outsourced support at 1&1. Your solution would work if I were able to access the website with an IP address. For some reason, whenever I type the IP into the url I get a 404 error. I'm guessing 1&1 doesn't allow accessing the webserver directly with an IP address. I mean, this solution would work perfectly if I can figure what i need to type into the address bar besides the IP. Neither http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/index.htm or http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/index.html work.
 
I have the same issue, but thankfully I don't rely on any kind of website to run the business.

Anyway, your DNS is getting goofed up like Azel said. There is an easier way to fix this that I can't think of right now, but waxing AD and starting over is the way to go as far as I'm concerned. I too inherited this domain.com business and while it would badly hurt to get everything moved over I can't stop thinking about how nice it would be to see domain.local pop up instead of domain.com internally.
 
feigned said:
I have the same issue, but thankfully I don't rely on any kind of website to run the business.

Anyway, your DNS is getting goofed up like Azel said. There is an easier way to fix this that I can't think of right now, but waxing AD and starting over is the way to go as far as I'm concerned. I too inherited this domain.com business and while it would badly hurt to get everything moved over I can't stop thinking about how nice it would be to see domain.local pop up instead of domain.com internally.
Click to expand...

Honestly, there is no way in hell i am going to redo active directory from scratch. We could care less about accessing the website from the lan (the site is only to be company profile). I just want to be able to update the pages from the lan. I would hate to have to bring that work home with me.

Does anyone have experience with 1and1? I see that on top of the main domain, mycompany.com, they also registered something like s(9-digits).onlinehome.us. I can access that domain fine from the lan and they seem to point to the same root directory on the webserver. I am in the process of turning on the frontpage extensions. Hopefully i can use that domain to access the root directory of the main domain and use FrontPage to publish the website. If that works, problem solved. Thanks for all the help guys!!!

EDIT:
Ok, problem solved. I am now able to access the onlinehome.us root directory with FrontPage. This means I can update the html for mycompany.com as well. In order for us to access the actual website from the lan, we simply need supply that onlinehome.us url. Now why couldnt the tech support rep at 1and1 tell me that? Oh yes...because his job was outsourced.
 
joecool234 said:
I apologize for the earlier comment...it was directed to the f'in useless outsourced support at 1&1. Your solution would work if I were able to access the website with an IP address. For some reason, whenever I type the IP into the url I get a 404 error. I'm guessing 1&1 doesn't allow accessing the webserver directly with an IP address. I mean, this solution would work perfectly if I can figure what i need to type into the address bar besides the IP. Neither http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/index.htm or http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/index.html work.
Click to expand...

1&1 may be use the same IP address to host multiple sites, so that may be why you canot access the server via IP.
 
Call your internal domain something else. My former employer used local.the-company-name.com.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top