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Two IIS Sites with Internet Connection Sharing and Internet Connection Firewall?

I have two Windows XP Pro machines, Maclir and Lugh, both configured for IIS (5.1). Maclir is configured with Internet Connection Sharing and Internet Connection Firewall, and Lugh connects to Maclir on a LAN connection, using its ICS services.

Can I run two independent IIS web sites, each with a different domain name but resolving to the same IP address by configuring some sort of passthrough to Lugh from Maclir? It appears possible to use two different domain names for one site on one machine but that's not what I want.

I'd like to do with IIS what I could do with Apache & Tomcat, with virtual or distributed hosts, or with the Borland Enterprise Server (which uses Apache and Tomcat). Can IIS be configured to do this? If so, how?

Thanks in advance,
Alan

Shalom Carmel

Alan,
You need either NAT or reverse proxy to achieve this funcionality.
ICS does not provide NAT, and IIS does not include reverse proxy.

What you can do, is setup IIS on Maclir to use port 8080, install Apache on this machine, and passthrough the HTTP requests either to MAclir:8080 or to Lugh using Apache built in reverse proxy support.

Or, by a decent firewall/router that will be able to do NAT to your servers.

ShalomC

sftweng

ASKER

Thanks, ShalomC. The configuration does include a LinkSys BEFSR41 Router which can forward selected ports to known NAT addresses but the problem is that ICS requires DHCP allocation of addresses (which might change) to its clients (e.g., Lugh) so I can't be certain of doing port forwarding that way. Maclir is setup now in the router's DMZ.

And just in case you ask, no I can't connect Lugh directly to the router with a fixed NAT IP address because the link to Maclir is a wireless link and I don't want to get another wireless adapter for Lugh.

It looks like I'll have to take your first suggestion but it would be nice to come up with a different solution. Perhaps I should just write a proxy (using Delphi) that distributes input from port 80 according to the DSN name (not numeric address) in the header to each client IIS node - can you comment about feasibility here for IIS? I guess I'd have to configure IIS to listen on the proxied port (say 8080) on each machine.

sftweng

ASKER

Sorry for the typo - that should be "DNS" name, not "DSN".

Shalom Carmel

Hey,
You can write your own proxy, if you really want.
You will find on MSDN sample code about writing ISAPI modules for IIS.
There are also some commercial and shareware proxy products, perhaps one fits your needs.
Personally, I would stick with apache.....

sftweng

ASKER

I suppose I should ask over in "Apache" but do you know if I can use logical (node) names in Apache proxy statements rather than hard-coded IP addresses, something like this?

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>

ServerName maclir.example.com
ProxyPass / http://maclir/domain1/
ProxyPassReverse / http://maclir/domain1/

</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>

ServerName lugh.example.com
ProxyPass / http://lugh/domain2/
ProxyPassReverse / http://lugh/domain2/

</VirtualHost>

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Shalom Carmel

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