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

[Mary Fagan]

----- Original Message -----
From: Danny Mayer
Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2001 9:54 PM
To: Mary Fagan; bind-users at isc.org
Subject: Re: Confirming if/how DNS can help support 2 sites on 1 server
  
I appreciate the information you and others have provided. It seems pretty clear that technically we should be able to put two sites on one server. By way of explanation, our web site was initially developed by a webmaster (from an outside company) who also was our server administrator. I don't know the details of his background, but think it probably unusual for one person to be expert in the whole range of needed skills (e.g., graphic design to DNS admin). Recently we "in-sourced" our web work (clearly distinguishing between the web content expert and the tech adm people. However, I think the person who has the task of dealing with server adm/dns also is responsible for lots of other things and I'm guessing hasn't had a lot of training in this area (or an expert to consult with).  I think 1) they thought 1 server= 1 site was the best/only way to go, 2) did not want to do anything they were unsure of and, as a result, mess up a working DNS, 3) may not have had the motivation to try to research it to the degree I did, and finally, 4) I suspect anyone who tried to figure this out from reading the OpenVMS manuals would quail at attempting it (and I have a lot of experience with VMS from a while back).
This mailing list and access to experts world-wide is a wonderful resource. Thanks.
---------------------
Someone's feeding you a lot of baloney.  If your organization runs a DNS Server
on no matter what operating system, VMS included, and it is authorative for
the org.com domain, you can do exactly what you want by adding a CNAME
record to the org.com zone:

xxx     IN CNAME        www

Then add a virtual server to IIS to recognize the host name.  You need to look at
the IIS documentation for details on how to do this.

By the way, you mentioned not only org.com but also org.edu.  If you are dealing
with multiple domains you need to do it for each domain.  Registering it with
Network Solutions is not involved here and you don't need an additional IP address,
though you can if you want, in which case what you need to add to the DNS zone
is:

xxx     IN A 1.2.3.5

and you need to modify IIS to recognize that address and add the IP address to
the Network so that the machine recognizes the address.  Virtual servers are
a much better solution for what you need.

         Danny
At 12:15 PM 8/26/01, Mary Fagan wrote:
>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!