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DNS Information

Currently I have a customer with a website hosted on a webserver on there internal lan. The website can be accessed from the internet but not internally. This is because they have a firewall address in there DSN listed as the www record for the domain name the website uses. One thing that is confusing is that this company's IT guy would put in thier DNS every domain they had purchased. So the windows 2003 domain they use internally is in there with about 3 or 4 others. One of the others is where the website is being published from. I'll refer to it as site.com. In DNS for the zone site.com the www entry pionts to the firewalls outside address. The firewall reserves the internal connection of this address for its web managment console. I changed the www record for the site.com zone and they could access it internally and I could access it from my office. about 20 min. later the site was gone from the internet but still up internally. I changed the record back and it went away from the internal and was back on the internet. I thought the internal dns was only for internal use I didnt realize it propogated records up to the isp's dns. I thought about changing the websites ip address to something other than the firewalls external address but I think the firewall only supports one outside ip. The firewall is a watchguard soho 6.

Any suggestions in how to make the website available internally.

Can and should the dns propogation to the isp's be disabled and if so, how?

Also anyone have any suggested reading to learn more about advanced DNS?

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NYtechGuy

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officecare

ASKER

I think we are on the right track. They currently have a site.com zone on the internal DNS that pionts to the external address but when I changed the www record ip it changed it for everyone internal and external. How do I control what propogates to the isp dns servers vs what doesnt?

NYtechGuy

They should be different servers- totally different hardware.

For instance, the external DNS that controls everything across the internet is *usually* hosted at the registrar (Network Solutions, Register.com, Bulkregister.com, etc) or at the web host (Interland, etc).

The internal DNS (which is where DNS for Active Directory is) would be on your Active Directory DOmain Controller (DC) which should be down the hall from you.

These two roles should NEVER be on the same server. I can't tell you what a security risk that is if that's the case.

It is also recommended (to avoid issues like this) to have your AD Domain end with .local (yourdomain.local) as opposed to using the .com (your company.com).

To check what is what:

1. Go to this site: http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
2. Enter your domain (yourdomainname.com) hit enter
3. On the domain record, at the bottom, see what servers are listed and write them down (hostname and IP address)

Are those IP addresses on your network?

If you aren't sure what your external IP is, click this link: http://whatismyip.com
- Is the IP address listed the same network as the ones from step #3?

Thanks,

Justin