So basically.
I have one external IP.
I am running few web servers on my internal network.
All web servers are configured in NAT with different ports (80,81,82,...)
My domain's DNS is configured on my external IP. And NAT forwards it to my first web server.
Until now when I open my domain let's say example.com it opens my first web server's page.
When I open example.com:81 it opens second server, etc..
What I am trying to achieve is some way to open my other web servers on different sub-domains without specifying port.
So I would like to have something like:
second.example.com -> example.com:81
third.example.com -> example.com:82
I am using SRV record for my TeamSpeak3 server, so my TS3 is running on port 2222 and SRV record translates my ts3.example.com to example.com:2222 and it works like a charm.
Can those sub-domains be configured by SRV records in DNS?
If it can't. Is there any other way?
Thanks
Since you are behind a NAT all your web-servers share the same endpoint. You will need to set up virtual hosts that resolve all requests based on domain information passed in an HTTP packet. The server that hosts these virtual hosts will then parse the incoming packets and distribute the request to the appropriate virtual host based on domain name resolution.
Apache makes this pretty easy through its implementation of name-based virtual hosts.
IIS has a solution as well as this stack overflow answer points to.
Good luck!
Related
I am trying to get the big picture although my primary domain is not networking.
Some question's narrowed down for which I'm not getting enough/proper answers online
Is the IP that is resolved by the DNS server when I hit www.google.com is same as any of the Google router's Gateway IP?
Do bigger companies like Amazon do port forwarding?
If point 2 is true, I suppose they must be port forwarding with only 443 (https) port which means, to use multiple static IP across different data centers, they need to have that many routers. So, if they have N static IP address which resolves to a website, then they must be having N routers right? Is this a fair assumption?
A gateway IP refers to a device on a network which sends local
network traffic to other networks. it sits between you and internet,or other network . its like a watchman.
Question 1 : google.com has multiple ip addresses lets say then , Yes, that is possible, and will need to be two A records. This is called Round-Robin DNS. Clients will semi-randomly use one of the two addresses.
question2: yes port forwarding happens more often than we think. ALL VPC's (virtual private clouds like AWS , GCP , Azure etc) use this as they dont want to expose servers/internal resources to the internet.
depending on the port number , particular service is exposed to requesting client. lets say we want to make a website public , then we explicitly expose port 80(http) 443(https) so that web crawlers and users can see them.
Port forwarding, sometimes called port mapping, allows computers or
services in private networks to connect over the internet with other
public or private computers or services.
google https://www.google.com:444/ wont work because they did not expose port 444 on their cloud router
but https://www.google.com:443/ will work because the server corresponding to google.com has explicitly left it open.
How IP is resolved:
Step 1 - Send a Request to Resolve a Domain Name
When you type www.google.com into a browser, in order to load the webpage, your computer asks for the IP address. Computers do not know in advance where they can find the necessary information, so they try searching through the DNS cache and for available external source. proceed from lower level caches to root/main servers.
Step 2+3 - Try to resolve an IP Locally
Before going externally, your computer loads the local DNS cache database to see if you already requested the IP for that domain name. Every computer has a temporary cache with the most recent DNS requests and attempts to connect to online sources. if required record is present locally its called "CACHE HIT" and query stops.
However A computer’s local DNS cache database does not always contain the necessary data to resolve a domain name this is called a "CACHE MISS" . In that case, the request goes further to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and its DNS server.
Step 4 - ISPs Ask Outside DNS Servers to Provide an IP Address iff Cache miss
ISP DNS resolvers are configured to ask other DNS servers for correct IP address mapping until they can provide data back to the requester. These are iterative DNS queries.
When a DNS client sends such a request, the first responding server does not provide the needed IP address. Instead, it directs the request to another server that is lower in the DNS hierarchy, and that one to another until the IP address is fully resolved. There are a few stops in this process.
hierarchy looks like this (just for reference):
Root domain nameservers. Root servers themselves do not map IP addresses to domain names. Instead, they hold the information about all top-level domain (TLD) nameservers and point to their location. TLD is the rightmost section of a domain name... Root servers are critical since they are the first stop for all DNS lookup requests.
TLD nameservers. These servers contain the data for second-level domains, such as ‘phoenixnap’ in phoenixnap.com. Previously, the root server pointed to the location of the TLD server. Then, the TLD server needs to direct the request toward the server that contains the necessary data for the website we are trying to reach.
Authoritative nameserver. Authoritative servers are the final destination for DNS lookup requests. They provide the website’s IP address back to the recursive DNS servers. If the site has subdomains, the local DNS server will keep sending requests to the authoritative server until it finally resolves the IP address.
Step 5 - Receive the IP Address
Once the ISP’s recursive DNS server obtains the IP address by sending multiple iterative DNS queries, it finally returns it to your computer. The record for this request now stays cached on the hard drive. The browser can then fetch this IP from the cache and connect it to the website’s server.
ALL this happens in less than 1 second, most of the times. if you just registered a new domain it might take few hours to propagate this DNS cache globally hence newly registered websites do not show up sometimes.
About companies owning multiple IPs
Big companies have pool of IPs reserved for example 123.234.xxx.xxx which means a company has reserved 255*255 ips. they are mapped on a VPC(virtual private cloud)
and accessible vis a subnet masking and CIDR feature, like your EC2 instances on AWS
Is the IP that is resolved by the DNS server when I hit www.google.com is same as any of the Google router's Gateway IP?
For sure it should, but it is mostly a Google management question that only they will be able to answer right. The thing is that we must understand how DNS query's work for this.
Let's take a look of it:
Device A requests the IP address through a DNS query of the device B.
To do this, it uses the network port 53 (Domain) on which it will ask, depending on which DNS server is being used at the time, which is usually the home router. Then the router will ask the ISP's DNS server, which will respond with a cached response, or the query with another server on top of it if it does not have one; All this process is followed until a reliable cache response is reached or until the authoritative response server is reached, that is, the name server that manages the domain in question.
Only the authoritative response server contains the reliable information of which IP of the domain which is going to be reached.
I suppose that within Google's servers and its network they use Google's own DNS servers, which are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 where the DNS records are obtained and consulted by caching from many sites.
In general terms Google's IP will change depending on where you are, I made a DIG query to Google's authoritative servers, however, I received a result based on location to improve the route and loading time of the site which was 142.250.73.238.
Do bigger companies like Amazon do port forwarding?
Yes, they do. To handle queries with load balancers or similar and even for caching dns requests.
If point 2 is true, I suppose they must be port forwarding with only 443 (https) port which means, to use multiple static IP across different data centers, they need to have that many routers. So, if they have N static IP address which resolves to a website, then they must be having N routers right? Is this a fair assumption?
This has multiple answers. By the way, they actually can do a secure DNS query.
if they have N static IP address which resolves to a website, then they must be having N routers right?
They don't have to, but if they want to they can.
"Is this a fair assumption?"
No, the IP's doesn't depend on a router, the router only routes to a computer/server which can have multiple IP's. By the other hand, each thing (computer, server, etc... must have an IP which can be also a WAN IP).
I'm currently configuring DNS in my network with Bind9.
This network is splitted in VLANs and it should have 2 DNS zones : an internal zone (internal servers, users VLAN...) and an external zone (DMZ).
Of course the DNS mustn't give internal records to an external request.
I have just configured my DNS master (storing external and internal records) in "internal servers" VLAN and I'm asking myself how to deal with this problem :
-> My DNS master will not reply to an external request since it is in the internal zone (though 802.11Q is enabled), even with external records. Is it right?
-> My DNS mustn't be in the DMZ.
-> If I configure a slave on the DMZ to manage the external zone, who will just store external records, then I have to configure another slave to replicate the master (so 3 servers...).
Initially I just planned to configure 2 servers, a master and a slave which would just be a full replicate.
Am I missing something? Is there any better solution?
The architecture that you will follow depends on what you want to serve and where (internal clients, external both)?
In general, yes you need internal DNS servers these will have at least all the necessary entries for you internal network.
As for the servers in DMZ who will have access to them and from which path? If you need access to them from the internal network directly through firewall, it makes sense to have entries for them also in your internal dns servers.
If you serve also from servers in DMZ to external users you have two solutions either you declare them in public DNS if the external users are from internet or you should have another DNS server on your DMZ.
The key point here is to think who will visit your server and from which path, then it will become kind of obvious how you will configure DNS for them.
I have a website that I'm running locally at localhost:8000. I'd like to access my site from other devices on my network. I've tried to visit the site via my computer's internal IP address via: 127.0.0.1:8000but this doesn't work. Is this possible?
Three most probable things:
Check if there is a network route between the client and the server machine (commands like PING and TRACERT will help);
Check if the server machine has a firewall. If it does, there must be a rule allowing (opening) connections through that port (8000) in TCP;
Most likely, the problem is one of the two above. If not, there's one last thing:
Make sure the web server (the one that serves localhost:8000) is bound to listen to all IP addresses (not only 127.0.0.1).
To know that, search for servername bind all ip addresses on google. E.g., for apache HTTPD, it'd be apache bind all ip addresses.
here is what I do in similar cases:
search rejetto hfs on google, it is single executable less than 1Mb size and download it into your server machine.
after starting it, follow menu->IP addresses. these are all your possible addresess on the server side.
these are your IP addresses to enter, and your port is 8000 as you mentioned.
most possible IP addresses you will find are in the format of following:
192.168.?.?
10.0.0.?
169.254.?.?
besided you will probably need to add a firewall rule for your server app.
I have got a dedicated server that has nginx web server located in a uk datacenter, the ngnix acts as a front end server which then directs users to other instances that i have on aws located in america. What ip address would the client see, the ngnix front server(which is the desired result), or would the client still know about the instances or servers ip address located in america?
PS. nginx acts as a load balancer here.
Typically, users connect to "www.yoursite.com", and that gets looked up in DNS.
Assuming there is only one DNS entry (corresponding your nginx frontend), then as far as those users are concerned, they are only talking to that one machine.
Sometimes people use round-robin DNS, where multiple machines correspond to a given host name.
Presumably you would know if you were doing this, though (:
You can confirm this by tracing your traffic when connecting. Maybe use WireShark?
I use to develop my project on my localhost, on apache in ubuntu machine.
Sometimes i need to show progress to my costumer.
Is it possible to access to localhost from remote machine?
You can use a service that provides a tunnel to your local service, such as localtunnel, pagekite or ngrok. These services simplify setting up remote demos, mobile testing and some provide request inspection as well.
I find ngrok useful because it provides a https address, which is needed to test things like webcam access.
Terms used in this answer:
Host = machine with site on it
Client = machine you are trying to access the host from
If the host and client are on the same network, you can access the host from the client by entering
http://(hostname or ip address)
in your client's browser. If the site is not running on port 80 (for http) or port 443 (for https), add the post as so (this example is for if your server is on 8080, a common alternate port):
http://(hostname or ip address):8080
If the host and client are not on the same network, and you need to reach across the internet from the client to see the host, you will need to make your host available on the internet for the client to access.
This can be extremely dangerous for your information security if you're not sure what you're doing and I'd recommend getting a cheap-o hosting account (can get them for like $10/month at places like 1:1 hosting).
There are many methods to do this - the difference is security, easiness of the configuration and cost of the solution.
Following I am typing some methods with some analyses
Port Forwarding (with Dynamic DNS and SSL encryption)
This requires router configuration (to forward your routers public port to loclhoat port), however this requires you to have fixed ip address. In case your ip address is not fixed (in most cases) you need to use Dynamic DNS services to be able to use domain name instead ip address (there are lot of available free services). Here we still have security question open. To solve security question i.e. setup ssl certificate we can use Let’s Encrypt service ( https://letsencrypt.org/ ) to get free certificate, however we should configure local server to use the certificate or we should setup reverse proxy (in most cases nginx or apache) and configure proxy to use certificate.
Conclusion – Hard to setup if we want to have secure connection (can be done for free)
VPN
For this scenario we should use VPN services. We should connect our local machine to VPN then in other side we should connect our client's machine to VPN that will allow us to access to localhost by local IP address. We can set up our own VPN server however this requires knowledge to do it right.
Conclusion – Easy, Paid, Secure, Bad User Experience (connecting to VPN every time you need to connect to localhost)
Tunneling
For this scenario we can use free tunneling services (i.e. https://tunnelin.com/). The process is very straight forward i.e. Register a User, Connect your device to service (by running one line command on device), use Web interface to open/close secure tunnels to the device.
Conclusion – Free, Secure, Easy
Yes, if you have a public and static IP. Usually, ISPs offer static ips during a session (i.e. until you disconnect and connect again)