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I have an intranet network on which a Windows IIS7 server is named mycompany.com. We also have a website hosted elsewhere named mycompagny.com.

From the outsite of the network, everything is fine for our current use case. But from the inside, it's not possible to access the website in a browser without the www prefix. It return a dummy page from IIS7.

A hack used by a colleague is to skip local DNS routing by using google's DNS service. A major con for the solution is that it have to be configured locally on all machines and that it disable local http serving.

Another hack would be to always use www, but we have some subdomains that are not configured to work with it. For example, our famous: nice-app.mycompagny.com.

I can't just change the intranet server name because it's already used for other purpose as ssh-access-ing a bunch of machines ftp-serving. Renaming mycompagny.com by mycompagny-intranet.com or something else would certainly breaks a lot of things and create headheaches for everyone for a couple of days ... As I am new here, I can't afford it.

How could I handle that specific problem?

This kind of duplicate use of DNS duplicate seem to be a common anti-pattern in the windows server community, at least it have been reported many times on Serverfault:

How could one prevent that to happen again at the design stage of a network?

EDIT: The sub-question is clearly a duplicate of Windows Active Directory naming best practices?.

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jvtrudel
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1 Answers1

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You (or your predecessor) shot yourselves in the foot by choosing the wrong DNS name for your Active Directory domain name. This results in DNS A records for your bare domain name pointing to your domain controllers rather than your external corporate website.

To solve that many people do something equally horrible, they run a webserver on each and every mycompany.com AD domain controller that sends a HTTP redirect from the bare domain name to www.mycompany.com.

(Your remark "It return a dummy page from IIS7." seems to indicate you already run IIS on your domain controller(s) so you only need to configure a site with a redirect there.)

HBruijn
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