Confirming if/how DNS can help support 2 sites on 1 server

Mary Fagan mhftex at msn.com
Sun Aug 26 16:15:23 UTC 2001


I am involved with setting up a new center within our organization. I asked about having the address xxx.org.com instead of www.org.com/xxx for our web site as I was pretty sure that this could be done. I was told that in order to have a specialized domain like this, we would have to: (1) register it with NetworkSolutions.com, (2) assign an IP address to that name and (3) add it to the DNS server. After more discussion, I was told that in order to set up a web address of xxx.org.edu, I would need to set up my own physical web server. Then the IP address of that web server could be entered into the DNS table.  Our main organizational web server is running IIS 4.0 on NT, and I did some research and found that I could use host header names with a single static IP address to host multiple sites.
However, all the documentation I found assumed you were using Windows 2000 to manage the DNS/name resolution. In following up with my system administrator, I found our DNS server is completely separate, running on an OpenVMS platform using Digital's implementation of BIND.  It would seem that since the web server would allow multiple sites on one physical server, that our DNS server software was the problem. I have spent most of the day reading OpenVMS documentation online – and, of course, am no wiser on if or how it could be done.  
This discussion list archives have been very helpful. I found several messages that indicated that we should be able to do what I wanted and that our DNS is not the bottleneck (unless somehow, we have an old OpenVMS version that won’t support the need??).  But, I want to make absolutely sure of what needs to be done (before I go back to the sys adm again):
1) you set up BIND to own the domains. Each would have its own zone and the address that will be in the URL should point to the same address in the zone file – something like this:
www.org.com     1.1.1.1
xxx.org.com        1.1.1.1
Question: Do you have to register xxx.org.com as a “friendly name” if you own www.org.com?
2) Then you set up the virtual web site.
3) The IIS 4.0 interprets the host header in the client’s request and directs it to my virtual web site.
Is setting up the DNS entries so complex that I need to buy the recommended “DNS and BIND” book for me and/or our administrator? Is there something I’m overlooking?? Some reason why you should put a site on a separate physical machine and not use DNS/Host header names to manage it?
Thanks for any and all help!



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