Hosts file - Error 404 - iis-7

I am trying to run test and production sites in ASP.NET IIS config. I have following entries in my Hosts file:
172.16.5.178 testsite ### test site
172.16.170.41 www.mysite.com ### LIVE WEBSITE
I have two problems here: I can not navigate to my test site using IP Address or using "testsite" in browser. I tried using all combinations: http://testsite, http://mysite:8080, http://mysite:80, 172.16.5.178, 172.16.5.178:80 and so on. But none of them works for me.
If I however use following entry, it works correctly:
172.16.5.178 www.mysite.com ### test site
Note that I used Test Server IP Address and actual Name from Live Site, and it worked.
Can anyone tell me why is this happening? I thought writing in Hosts file will navigate to respective IP Address no matter what I use as name. And indeed it goes to that IP address but shows "Not Found" and "HTTP Error 404. The requested resource is not found." error.
Any help?

Editing your hosts file will basically send your browser to the designated IP address for that host/url. The destination IP address has to have something on the other end that is expecting that, if that makes sense.
If you set up a site in IIS on 172.16.5.178 called testsite, with a binding of testsite, then it would work fine, as it then knows what to do with that request. Then going to http://testsite will work. I'm assuming that's the part you are missing!
I've personally got plenty of development sites in my hosts file pointing to an IIS installation on a network server. You just need to make sure the destination server can work out what to do with testsite.

Related

How to access website using hostname instead of ip address?

I am working on a wordpress website and I'm unable to access my website using the host-name. [However, I'm able to access my website through the ip address. For example, when I enter 10.20.0.18, I'm directed to 10.20.0.18/wp-admin/plugins.php]
I am new to hosting and I was just able to update my hosts file and properly link the ip address to hostname by reading through some articles.
I also checked these links are correct using ping command.
For example, my hosts file looks something like this,
#Host file starts here
127.0.0.1 localhost
10.20.0.18 www.webserver.abc.com
66.155.40.202 api.wordpress.org
#End of host file
Now, when I try to access the website using hostname through my web browser, I get this error.
This site can’t be reached www.webserver.abc’s server IP address could not be found.
I am not sure where I am going wrong, or do I need to make some more changes in other files?

How do I give access to another computer on my network, to my website hosted locally?

We have a local instance of IIS 7 running with a website. Instead of the default "localhost" we have something like, mysite.compname.com. This is a separate entry into IIS 7 and the default website was removed to prevent confusion.
Then in our host file we an entry like this:
127.0.0.1 mysite.compname.com
Now when I try to hit this url, http://127.0.0.1/ApplicationName/Project/AddProject.aspx technically it should work, but instead I get a 404. I can vouch that this isn't a problem with the application, because if I navigate to http://mysite.compname.com/ApplicationName/Project/AddProject.aspx it works fine.
My end goal is to be able to give someone my computer name, so that they can visit a test page, so the url above I think would get turned into this http://computername/ApplicationName/Project/AddProject.aspx. Any help or at least links to understanding would help because I'm not sure where my issue is coming from.
It sounds like the IIS site / application is configured using a Host Header.
This means that the site will only respond if the host header sent by the browser matches the one configured for the site.
This is a standard method to allow one server to host sites for many host and domain names.
If you wish to allow others to view the site on your computer you will need to either have a local DNS server which you can edit, or, probably the easiest option, get them to edit their host files to include
<your IP> mysite.compname.com.
Remember to open the requisite ports (probably only 80, maybe 443 for https) in your firewall.
Or, you can try to edit the site config to remove or modify the Host Header requirement. See the first link for details, but be careful, it's easy to break things if you don't know the entire architecture of the site.

I cannot access my IIS7 site on the network

I have an IIS7 site that works fine while on the server, however refuses to work from anywhere on the network.
When logged onto the IIS Server itself (with remote desktop) then the website shows fine, as per this link (I used port 801 for this site):
http://localhost:801/
However when attempting to access this site from the network, it refuses to work, giving the generic 'cannot display the webpage' message, while using the following link:
http://<<my IIS server>>:801/
Another thing I have noticed however is that on the network the default page (port 80) of the IIS server DOES work. I.E this following link shows the standard IIS7 page:
http://<<my IIS server>>:80/
Most of the help topics I've read point to it being a firewall issue, however as a test I disabled all firewall settings on the IIS Server, yet it still refused to show.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?
Many thanks
Did you tried with computer name and / or IP Address
e.g: http://192.168.1.105:80/
http://DELL_PC:80/
Run the following tests:
Check connectivity from both computers.
Firewall settings, temporary disable the firewall from all profiles (private, domain, public) if this works, try adding a Port Rule to your firewall allowing incoming connections to port 80.
Also, it'd be important to check the bindings configuration of your website, bindings specify the address the server should listen to for incoming connections, make sure you have 'All Unassigned'.
Reference : Click Here !!

IIS website inaccessible from server (but ok from outside)

On a server where an IIS website is hosted, if I open IE or Firefox and type the IIS website url, i got an error after a few seconds ("Cannot display the webpage", just like website would be offline). If I do the same from the exterior (as normal user do) everything works.
I have tried to give the IP address directly (thus skipping DNS), problem is the same. It only works if I type the internal ip address of the IIS website (eg : 10.0.0.x).
The reason I want to do that is that I need to access a specific page of the website in order to execute a scheduled task. I cannot use internal ip address to do that, because host name (HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.Host) is used inside ASP.NET code to switch between different configuration.
Here is my question : is it possible to access a specific page on a IIS website from server where website is hosted ? (using complete url, not internal ip address ?)
Yes - If I understand your question correctly you should be able to add a mapping in your local hosts file to point that domain at your IIS webserver.
e.g.
10.0.0.x my.example.hostname
(where x is obviously a number)
We use this configuation internally when developing multiple sites on our local machines - each site is bound to a specific hostname and all these hostnames have mappings in the 'hosts' file to 127.0.0.1
The same principal applies here, if I've understood the question correctly :)

Windows Authentication Only Works With hosts entry

I'm setting up a (ASP.NET) website to be used internally at my company. In IIS, I've turned on Integrated Windows authentication and turned off anonymous access. Once I've done this, the website pops up the "enter your username/password" box whenever you visit the site, but won't log you in even if the username/password are correct. This happens even if you're logged in to your computer with a domain account as opposed to a local account.
However, if I enter the IP of the site in my hosts file, the site works perfectly (logs the user in without the additional challenge).
I guess I have two questions.
1) Why does the hosts entry have this affect?
2) How can I get the site to succeed without a) forcing everyone to edit their hosts file or b) the site challenging them and failing to log them in?
EDIT: I checked, and we do have our DNS server set up to point those URLs to the correct servers. That's why pinging the URL displays the right IP. However, it appears that in addition to having that DNS entry, we also have to have the hosts file entry for the site to work.
You probably are having an issue with Kerberos authentication.
Since you're using a url of Site.DomainName.com, I'm assuming DomainName.com is your AD's name also.
On the server that's running IIS, copy SetSPN.EXE from the resource kit tools and run the following:
setspn -A http/site.domainname.com IISServerName
Where SITE is your URL and IISServerName is the name of the server.
This sure sounds like a dns problem. Does the dns server know about the hostname you are using? Sounds like the dns server does not know the forward lookup (hostname to ip) for the host you are trying to connect to.
We recently set up an intranet site with windows authentication here. The network guys setup a group policy and pushed changed to IE and Firefox.
For IE, it added the site to "Intranet Sites" and for Firefox it modified the configuration file so that our intranet..com would be trusted.
So... we got it to work. Here's what happened.
While looking around at the DNS Manager on test.DOMAINNAME.com, my coworker noticed that a different site on the same server was set up as a "Host (A)" entry, whereas the site we were working on was set up as an "Alias (CNAME)" entry. Several other sites on that computer were also set up as Alias entries, and he mentioned that the one site with the Host entry was "rock-solid", and he'd had sporadic issues with at least one other site that was set up as an Alias.
We talked to the AD/DNS admin, and as a test, he switched our entries from Alias to Host, and once we cleared our local DNS caches, it worked perfectly (without requiring entries in our .hosts file).
So the question still sorta stands. This was a Win2k3 box serving as one of three internal DNS servers, and making this modification fixed our problem. If anyone can add any additional information, we'd be very grateful, but in the meantime, we're debating going back and fixing all our other sites.

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