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How does DNS works?

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by den_santiago

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I'm currently studying the principles of DNS works. Is it possible to have 2 domains
in one web server such as IIS in one computer. Let's say on Computer WEBFV we will have ISM01.com, ISM02.com and ISM03.com. And also is it possible to use DNS in Windows 98 Web Server for accessing the home site. Usually when I want to access my web site I had to either type the I.P address of my computer as the web host or the COMPUTER_NAME. Could anyone give me steps on how are they done?

7 replies

by curlergirl

I think you are missing a basic understanding of DNS servers - or possibly I am misunderstanding your question. Yes, you can have multiple web sites on a server and use different domain names. However, DNS is not something you control from your web site - a DNS server and a web server are two different things entirely. You can set up your own DNS server, but in order to resolve a public web site name on your own DNS server, your DNS server has to have a public IP address and be published on the web as a DNS server. Many people and many companies use their ISP's DNS servers to register their public web site addresses, even if they are hosting their own web site, to avoid the trouble of administering a DNS server on their own. If you want to use multiple domain names, all of the domain names you are going to use must be registered with InterNIC and the host DNS server(s) for those web sites must be identified as part of that registration. Then, you must have separate public IP addresses for each domain. All of these IP addresses can exist on one server, however, thereby allowing you to host all of the domain web sites on one web server. Hope this helps clarify things for you!

by shmaltz

I'm not sure what you are trying to acomplish with DNS in Win98. But here is a short explaination of DNS:

DNS only tells you what's the IP Address of the user friendly name you are using to connect to the computer (I.E. www.any.com = IP Address-xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx).
Once the computer that tries to connect to the user friendly name (in the above example www.any.com) knows that www.any.com is IP Address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx it connects to that IP Address on what ever port it is trying to connect (80 for the web [http]).
The above is the simple process of connecting to www.any.com when that server only runs one web site.
If however you want to host more than one web site on one computer (lets say www.any.com, and www.any2.com), the process involves one more step:
Since the client is connecting using HTTP. HTTP has an option called Host Header. The HTTP Server (the web server) will ask the client (browser) what host are looking for, the client then responds with the host it is looking for in our case www.any.com.
This option is supported on IIS 5.0 (which comes with Windows 2000). I'm not sure about IIS 4.0.
DNS has nothing to do with the Web Server.
Continued....

by shmaltz

I looked it up:
IIS 4.0 Does not support Host Headers. Instead in IIS 4.0 if you wanted to host multiple Web Sites you had to assign multiple IP address to the Server and then bind each web site to a different IP Address. Then you would tell DNS topoint for each web address to a different IP Address, While with the options of host headers you just point it to one IP Address.
Continued...

by shmaltz

Glossary:
IIS = Internet Information Server
HTTP = Hyper Text Terminal Protocol. The Protocol used on the internet to dislplay web pages.
Port = TCP port numbers. Numbers assigned to services that run on TCP/UDP.
DNS = Domain Name Server. A server that is responsible to resolve Domain Names into IP Address.
_________
Host headers is an option that was added to HTTP version 1.1. Older browsers do not support it (I believe that as early as Internet Explorer 3 already supports HTTP 1.1).

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