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I would like to have URLs for websites on my server to respond to site1.domainname.com instead of www.domainname.com/site1.
Is this at all possible, if so, how do I set it up?
[edited by: Webwork at 5:28 am (utc) on Sep. 30, 2005]
First of all, I'm fairly new to DNS, but I do have it up and running on a Win2k server.
IMHO there are two issues here, a DNS issue and an IIS issue.
Is your box really the one and only DNS server for your domain (i.e. all public DNS queries are answered by your box)? FWIW this would not be a 'typical' configuration - for suitable values for 'typical' :-)
1. You need your DNS configured so that site1.example.com resolves to your server (either set a CNAME or an A record in the public DNS).
2. You need to configure IIS to respond 'appropriately' to these requests. In IIS6 this would be done in IIS Manager using New > Website and setting a suitable host header so IIS can recognise the incoming request.
Of course, you might have an ISA Server in front of your IIS box, things are a little bit more complicated in that case.
Let us know more detail and we can help more :-)
I've been able to add the host headers in to IIS, but as far as the DNS goes, I'm clueless. I've been able to add other severs to the DNS so I can have "server1.domain.com" and "server2.domain.com", but as far as having several sites on one sever with a "site1.domain.com" type url, I'm still haveing problems.
This server runs both the DNS and the web site)
Perhaps I wasn't specific enough. Is your IIS box the public DNS server for your domain? It doesn't sound like it.
You need the public DNS to contain multiple A (or CNAME) records which point to your IIS box e.g.
www.example.com -> 192.168.0.1
site1.example.com -> 192.168.0.1
So someone enters www.example.com in their browser, it resolves to 192.168.0.1 which is your IIS box, your IIS box serves the pages from the default site.
Someone else enters site1.example.com, it also resolves to 192.168.0.1 which is still your IIS box but this time the IIS box sees the host header "site1.example.com" and servers the relevant content you have defined in IIS.
SO when you say you've defined domain1.example.com then you're basically there, you just point these records at your IIS box.
Remember we are talking about your PUBLIC DNS - what users on the internet see when they resolve things on your domain. This may be hosted by your ISP and merely installing Windows DNS on your IIS box wouldn't change this... I have a nagging feeling we might not yet have understood each other on this point :-)
