I simply want both example.com and www.example.com to go to the same website. Currently we have just added a binding to each. This creates a problem for WCF which then breaks because it says it can only accept one http address.
Is there a better way to configure a site to accept addresses with or without 'www'?
this has to be changed in the dns using a host or a record.
You shouldn't be hosting a site on the root domain. Better approach here is to redirect traffic to the root (.example.com) to the correct site (www.example.com) using an HTTP 302.
The WCF service should only receive traffic on its single binding. Use DNS, HTTP redirection, or some Traffic management application/appliance to get traffic from multiple points to the correct one.
Related
I'm planning on buying two domains.
Let's say they are domain1.com and domain2.com.
I will point them at two custom servers that I have on my computer, both of them having an HTML "browsable" endpoint.
I want to know if it's possible to point domain1.com to mycomputer:12345 and domain2.com to mycomputer:9876, so when you open, for example, domain2.com with your browser, it redirects the traffic to mycomputer:9876, without writing explicitly domain2.com:9876.
I've been searching for information about DNS records and reverse proxies, but I'm unable to figure out a way to achieve this, or something close to it.
Thanks for your time.
You can achieve this by using a reverse proxy server eg. nginx.
All you need to do is configure each domain to to the appropriate server and port in the nginx config.
Just for your information - At DNS level you can't mention ports, as DNS servers doesn't carry port information.
Let's say I have this DNS entry: mysite.sample. I am developing, and have a copy of my website running locally in http://localhost:8080. I want this website to be reachable using the (fake) DNS: http://mysite.sample, without being forced to remember in what port this site is running. I can setup /etc/hosts and nginx to do proxing for that, but ... Is there an easier way?
Can I somehow setup a simple DNS entry using /etc/hosts and/or dnsmasq where also a non-standard port (something different than :80/:443) is specified? Without the need to provide extra configuration for nginx?
Or phrased in a simpler way: Is it possible to provide port mappings for dns entries in /etc/hosts or dnsmasq?
DNS has nothing to do with the TCP port. DNS is there to resolv names (e.g. mysite.sample) into IP addresses - kind of like a phone book.
So it's a clear "NO". However, there's another solution and I try to explain it.
When you enter http://mysite.sample:8080 in your browser URL bar, your client (e.g. browser) will first try to resolve mysite.sample (via OS calls) to an IP address. This is where DNS kicks in, as DNS is your name resolver. If that happened, the job of DNS is finished and the browser continues.
This is where the "magic" in HTTP happens. The browser is connecting to the resolved IP address and the desired port (by default 80 for http and 443 for https), is waiting for the connection to be accepted and is then sending the following headers:
GET <resource> HTTP/1.1
Host: mysite.sample:8080
Now the server reads those headers and acts accordingly. Most modern web servers have something called "virtual hosts" (i.e. Apache) or "sites" (i.e. nginx). You can configure multiple vhosts/sites - one for each domain. The web server will then provide the site matching the requested host (which is retreived by the browser from the URL bar and passed to the server via Host HTTP header). This is pure HTTP and has nothing to do with TCP.
If you can't change the port of your origin service (in your case 8080), you might want to setup a new web server in front of your service. This is also called reverse proxy. I recommend reading the NGINX Reverse Proxy docs, but you can also use Apache or any other modern web server.
For nginx, just setup a new site and redirect it to your service:
location mysite.example {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
}
There is a mechanism in DNS for discovering the ports that a service uses, it is called the Service Record (SRV) which has the form
_service._proto.name. TTL class SRV priority weight port target.
However, to make use of this record you would need to have an application that referenced that record prior to making the call. As Dominique has said, this is not the way HTTP works.
I have written a previous answer that explains some of the background to this, and why HTTP isn't in the standard. (the article discusses WS, but the underlying discussion suggested adding this to the HTTP protocol directly)
Edited to add -
There was actually a draft IETF document exploring an official way to do this, but it never made it past draft stage.
This document specifies a new URI scheme called http+srv which uses a DNS SRV lookup to locate a HTTP server.
There is an specific SO answer here which points to an interesting post here
Is it possible to configure host header binding of site in IIS to a particular port so that users do not have to specify the port number in a url?
This is for an intranet site. We have several sites hosted on the one server each with their own host name with DNS entries which point to the same machine name.
I have tried specifying host-header name (site-specific hostname), unique port number and "*" for IP address, but to access the site I still have to specify the port number in the browser.
I was hoping that binding the site to the unique host name would be enough to resolve the site without having to specify the port number in the url.
Thanks.
What you need is a redirect.
What I would do, if there is no querystring is have a binding for the same domain in one of the standard ports 80 or 443 if you use SSL. Then use IIS Redirect to redirect all requests to the URL with the custom port.
Another way would be to use URL Rewrite to do the redirects so you can keep the querystring. For example 10 URL Rewriting tips and tricks
Scenario: I want a staging environment at a customer's site. The customer owns www.example.com. I want to map the site to staging.example.com reachable from the outside, but I haven't got time to wait for the bureaucracy surrounding either the purchase of the new subdomain or opening of secondary HTTP ports.
Assumption: If I spoof the HTTP Header param Host to be staging.example.com on the client side, but actually make the request to the IP of www.example.com, IIS will redirect the request to the configured site for staging.example.com. Am I right?
So is there any client tool that can help me with that? I'm fairly famailiar with Fiddler, but it seem to override my rewrites of the host parameter. Also I would need to configure it to do it for every request, not just one, to make it trivial to test.
Are there simpler solutions to this problem?
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking.
Inside Fiddler, by clicking Tools > HOSTS and you can send all traffic targeting one site, e.g. dev.example.com to the IP of your choice. The target site (namely dev.example.com) doesn't need to exist at all in this case. Your client (e.g. the browser) has no idea that Fiddler is retargeting the traffic, it just thinks that it is talking to dev.example.com.
If you have the Fiddler book, check out the Retargeting Traffic section for many other ways to retarget traffic.
I am trying to get around ISP limitations of 1 IP address. Here is what I am trying to do. I have two web servers running internally on my network. One is my main IIS box that runs 4 or 5 sites and I just added a windows home server. I have created a dns entry for it called home.mydomain.com and the other server reponds to www.mydomain.com.
My router is set to forward 80 to www.mydomain.com's server (192.168.1.3) so when requests come in for home.mydomain.com the request fails since www server is not set up to listen to that host header.
I would like to know if there is a way with IIS 7 to 'proxy' requests to home.mydomain.com (192.168.1.4). I had tried setting up HttpRedirect in IIS but that does not work as I would have hoped since it sends back a 302 to the client with a name that points back to the main IP address and then a vicious redirect loop happens.
I am told in apache this can be done by having one server proxy for the other. Can this be done in IIS 7? If not does anyone know of a webserver proxy type of software I can use?
Thanks in advance,
Rich
What you are looking for is a "reverse proxy". In Apache you can do this via mod_proxy. In IIS, you'll want to try the Application Request Routing package.
URL Rewrite for IIS can also be used to do reverse proxing.
Yet another reverse proxy package is Managed Fusion URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy