DNS splitting websites on one domain name

[lakeside12]

Please can someone help

We had an old website that is sitting on a windows 2008 Server running IIS (it is an ASP coded site) on hosting company A, with a fixed IP address

Our new site is at Hosting company B, fixed IP address, but it is a Joomla website PHP, unix

Our goal was to have both new content and old content show up with the DNS magic at the Same URL

We have one domain name so all the visitors come to the new website, however, we need the old website has content over 15,000 articles in google, so it is important to keep it

What we have done so far is to make the A record point to the old website and we are doing a Mod rewrite on the incoming URL query to redirect any "old website" url query to the old website, this worked for only 14 hours which occurred while we switched over the DNS from the old website to the new website.

Rigth now if you do a DIG on the Domain name you get one IP address for new website and if you do a ping you get the old website URL

BUT the old website URL when you enter that into the browser NOW gives you an error 216.87.191.15 I can get on the old server with remote desktop, but I cannot view any content via the URL and that is the problem,

Can anyone help or advise

Many thanks

 

[Noway2]

I see what you are saying, about getting an error: Bad Request - Invalid Hostname. I must admit that is a first for me. It looks like something got messed up when the DNS got translated. Normally, as long as the page was still hosted you should be able to pull it up via the IP instead of the name; unless the hosting service is using named virtual hosts all sharing an IP address. In which case, the default page with no host name comes up as the error page.

The way I am interpreting your post, you want the both pages to show up under one (dns) name. The problem I see with this is that while it is possible to have multiple IP associated with a name, it provides a conflict for which IP to return for the query. In other words, how does the DNS know to tell you to go to site A or site B?

I think the ultimate and long term approach is to see if there is any way you can extract the page information from the old site and convert it to the new one. Yes,I understand they are different languages and this isn't a drop in conversion.

In the mean time, you should look into why you can't access the old page via IP. If you can get access to the page again your mod-rewrite will buy you time till you figure out something more long term.

 

[lakeside12]

Hi

Thanks for your reply, the issue is that there are over 15,000 articles and translating them is not possible, we did look at that in depth.

Microsoft suggested this on that error 400

http://www.mrtweak.com/windows-serv...st-invalid-hostname-400-error-on-windows-iis/

so we did try this but it did not work we still get the error

Is there another approach we can try? or a step we are missing, it is strange it worked for 14 hours while the DNS's were changing over which suggests that it can work....

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated

 

[Noway2]

Could you access the site via IP before the DNS switch? It looks like one of two things has happened. 1- some configuration on your IIS server got messed up. 2- there is something funky going on with the hosting.

I would contact the hosting provider, tell them about the DNS switch and ask them if they have any ideas as to what is happening. Also ask them if the IP address is dedicated to your server or if they rely on named hosts to establish the connection.

 

[netsec50]

This is just a thought but could you not subdomain your domain and have the subdomain point to you old server. Then redirect links from your web site to the subdomain.

instead of

http://www.network-security.uk.net

pointing to server A

http://www2.networksecurity.uk.net

points to server A
&

http://www.network-security.uk.net

points to server B

Server A being the old server, Server B being the new.


Chris Jessup
IT Director

http://www.network-security.uk.net

 

[lakeside12]

Hi Thanks for your reply

We had tried that solution and it was ok and worked fine, but in the end we ended up with one domain name, then doing a Mod-Rewrite on url queries that specifically requested data from the old site and then redirected those customers so it all looks like one domain name, even though it is two. To make this work we had to make just the DNS A record point to the OLD site.

basically we split the domain and redirected traffic requesting old URL's to the old site

Thank you for your reply and for taking the time to post it, that is much appreciated, I should have posted back on here that I had a working solution

Many thanks