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Unable to browse to public website

Hi we have our public website - domain.org
our internal Windows domain/Active Directory that users PCs/laptops logon to is domain.org as well

externally we are able to login fine to domain.org
but internally there is 1 specific link that we are not able to open up, but can externally.

mrhamen

You will either have to setup an entry in your hosts file to access it or put a pointer in your DNS. We use hosts entries to resolve our public website internally.

nutekconsultants

ASKER

do you have an example of how to do that?

mrhamen

open the hosts file located in \windows\system32\drivers\etc then inside you should see an example but it is usally the ip address of the server then the fqdn of the server so it should look like

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx abc.com

Then save the hosts file and you should be ok.

nutekconsultants

ASKER

so I found the issue with help of SOnicwall my firewall vendor
https://www.domain.org is my website
domain.org is my internal Active Directory domain that users login to as well...

some links from user PCs are not working when trying to access www.domain.org website form inside the LAN, but work fine from outside.

we have an internal DNS Server with forwarders point to ISP...
clients get IP from DHCP Server and get internal dns server

upon testing - we assigned static dns on a PC with extenral dns settings 4.2.2.2 and 8.8.8.8 and the website worked fine, no issues...

so I have been told I need to either redo my internal domain naming scheme from domain.org to domain.local or something...

OR get the webdevelopers to do a redirect on the website...

MRHAMEN, I tried the host files, and it did not work

mrhamen

Correct the static dns worked becuase you are pulling the address from outside the domain and ignoring your internal dns servers. With you internal dns, dns is going to point to your domain controllers for any website that you try to pull up for xyz.com and more than likely the website is being hosted on another server with a different internal ip address. Not sure why the host file didn't work for you, that is how we have our internal machines point to our company website and it works great for us.

digitap

it appears the loopback on your sonicwall is working, so that's good. create a www host record on your internal DNS and point that to the private IP of your IIS server.

nutekconsultants

ASKER

digitap - the IIS Server is not resident at our office, it is somewhere out there, its a 3rd party company that is hosting and developing out www.domain.org website.
infact I think the website is using apache not IIS as per using Fiddler to diagnose this issue with Sonicwall.
I will re-try the hosts file, maybe I was doing it incorrectly, rookie mistake I guess!

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

digitap

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