DNS and forwarding

[bkesting]

Hi,

I have kind of a complex situation so please bear with me. I run a network that recieves its Internet access off of a wireless link from a seperate organization in town. None of our IP addresses are routable. All of our e-mail and web services are hosted out of town. I have recently setup a new online service that allows our city's library databases to be searched online over the web. The request to this service is made to our ISP and it is then forwarded to our local server for processing. Everything works great, except that I need to use two different URLs to access the service, one if the user is outside of our local network, and one if they are inside the local network. I think it would be difficult to setup a static route directing traffic from our local IP to our outside IP only to be directed back to our LAN IP all in an effort to be able to use one URL for all users. I was thinking of having the host of our website setup and entry in DNS to point to our outside IP and at the same time create a new forward lookup zone in our local Actice Directory DNS that would use the same domain name to point to our local address (this DNS server only serves requests on the local network). This way, for example, people on the outside could click on test.library.com and it would go to our outside IP which would forward to our internal server and our internal people who use our local DNS could click on the same test.library.com which would take them to our local server immediately. That way I can make one link off of a website to serve all people. My question is (if I haven't lost all of you) is, if I setup my local DNS to have a forward lookup zone for our website's domain to create the local address to link mapping and I use forwarders to our actual domain's DNS to serve all other requests to our domain (

http://www.library.com,

books.library.com, etc.) will that work fine?

Thanks for your time, (and for reading this novel!)

 

[dsterry]

bkesting,

You definitely don't need to direct LAN traffic out to get to your server. As you said, just make sure there's an entry in your AD Forward Lookup zone for the web server and that the webserver has a static ip. The ISP should be able to forward "test" to your IP address and then you'd just need to allow tcp port 80 port to get to the web server on the inside. Good luck. You might try posting more info about your internal network setup(subnetting, firewall, and routing) for a more detailed analysis.

Dave

 

[bkesting]

I will give it a shot.

Thanks.