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DNS - website resolution

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9 replies

by bmcafee

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Using Active Directory DNS, our local domain name is hmeps.org. All clients can resolve all internal computer names and external web sites except one. The website www.hmeps.org can not be reached by any web browser. It can not be pinged -- unknown host results. What do I need to do to correct this issue?

9 replies

by banyanman

In your local Active directory DNS have you created an Alias record named www for your web server that hosts the site. If you're not familiar with WIN2K DNS, you can open it up on your DNS server and under forward lookup zones choose the domain hmeps.org and right click and choose new-alias. HTH

by greybeard770

I assume your www site has a fixed IP address. You would need to configure that server to register with the DNS server or create a manual entry for it.

by bmcafee

We are not using a proxy server. www.hmeps.org is hosted externally by an ISP. The only way clients can access this website is my modifying \winnt\system32\drivers\etc\host file and adding for example x.x.x.x www.hmeps.org. What DNS entry will accomplish the same result?

by timwalsh

Answer 1 is the most correct so far. To further expand on it, when creating the alias, you must enter the Fully Qualified Name (FQN) of your ISP's web server (servername.ISPdomain.com).

The end result will be as follows:
1. Since your DNS server thinks it is authoritative for the hmeps.org domain, it will not forward any queries it can't resolve to an outside source.
2. When it receives a query for www.hmeps.org, it will find an alias for www in its lookup table that points to a resource outside your domain. This will cause all traffic bound for www.hmeps.org to be forwarded to webserver.ISPdomain.com.

Hope this helps.

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