Route incoming DNS alias to a sub folder?

[Tim_Myth]

I have a DNS alias on my company's intranet (sales). It currently points to an old server, but my DNS management group can point it to a nicer, newer server (with a DNS alias of Marketing). Problem is, the space I am being given on the newer server is in a sub folder (marketing/sales_folder). How do I make it so that when my co-workers type in Sales, they get routed to the index page at [marketing...] instead of the index page for Marketing?

[marcel]

Hi Tim, if I have understood it correctly, your colleagues type 'Sales' into the adres bar of the browser and will be directed to the new server?

The easiest way to do a redirect (AFAIK) is to create a new website in IIS, add 'Sales' to the host headers, and then redirect this to the new URL. YOu can do this all within the properties of the new IIS website you have just created.

If you need more help, or if I have misunderstood, let me know

[Tim_Myth]

Thanks for the reply Marcel. That's exatly right. We currently type 'sales' into the address bar and we are taken to the site set up on the old server. The new server alreay has a DNS alias for 'marketing', and when I type that into my address bar, I am taken to the marketing site hosted on the new server (which resides in the wwwroot folder). Now that sales is lumped in with the marketing group, my department manager wants to incorporate the sales website with the marketing website. I already have a subfolder on the marketing site that is accessible by typing 'marketing/sales' into the address bar, but I'm lazy. I'd much rather keep the alias 'sales' and simply have it point to the 'marketing/sales' folder.

In my non-work related life, I do have a bunch of websites hosted on 4 different apache servers. Using the GUIs provided by my personal hosting companies (GoDaddy and 1and1) I know how to accomplish this, but I've never actually managed a server and know absolutely nothing about accomplishing this in IIS. For various company politics reasons the marketing team does not want to involve IT in the process (mostly they're afraid IT will lock them out of their own server), and the guy who actually knew how to administer the server was laid off 2 months ago in the same corporate restructuring that combined Sales and Marketing (I knew I should have stayed in school).

I did find a tutorial on adding host headers (http://www.visualwin.com/host-header/). If I understand it correctly, in the step where I specify IP address, port setting, and host header I simply enter 'sales' in the host header portion. Is that correct?

[marcel]

If I understand it correctly, in the step where I specify IP address, port setting, and host header I simply enter 'sales' in the host header portion. Is that correct?

Yes, that should do the trick, here is a step by step rundown of how I would accomplish this (in IIS 6)

- Open the IIS 6 Manager (Administrative Tools ¦ IIS Manager)
- In the left pane, Expand the local computer
- Right-click on the 'Web Sites' folder en select New ¦ Website...
- In the wizard that appears, give the website a name (eg. Sales)
- The next step, IP adress and port settings, leave the fields as they are except for the bottom one, Host Header. Type 'Sales' (without quotes) into this field
- In the next step, browse to the location of your Marketing/Sales folder
- Make sure to select the correct permissions in the following step (for the most applications, Read and Run Scripts will be sufficient)

That's it, your site should now work.