Quick question about http re-directs

Catanonia · 2 Jun 2014 at 11:31

If I wanted to go about redirecting a users web link inside IE how would I go about it.

Some info

All in house web servers

User is part of domain called test.co.uk

They have a website they go to that is http://portal.testgto.co.uk/somecrap

They want to be able to type http://portal on thier local IE and be taken to http://portal.testgto.co.uk/somecrap by default.

Would you do this via DNS on the AD , proxy settings or another method ?

Would DNS and CNAME work for this ?

Thanks for any pointers, googling is not helping me until I can work out the technology to use. So any useful hints to start the research would be most helpful.

Thanks

Toughnoodle · 2 Jun 2014 at 15:27

I would set up DNS on the domain controller for "portal" to point to an internal IIS server. Create a site in IIS that responds to "portal" and set it to redirect to "http://portal.testgto.co.uk/somecrap".

If you created a CNAME for "portal" and "portal.testgto.co.uk" it wouldn't take you into the subdir. Also, you'd have to make the "portal.testgto.co.uk" server respond to requests to "portal" too.

Catanonia · 2 Jun 2014 at 15:37

Toughnoodle said:
I would set up DNS on the domain controller for "portal" to point to an internal IIS server. Create a site in IIS that responds to "portal" and set it to redirect to "http://portal.testgto.co.uk/somecrap".

If you created a CNAME for "portal" and "portal.testgto.co.uk" it wouldn't take you into the subdir. Also, you'd have to make the "portal.testgto.co.uk" server respond to requests to "portal" too.

thanks mate, after some reading it would appear that it would need this 2 stage approach as DNS is just mapping and not HTTP redirection.

Thanks again.

Hellsmk2 · 2 Jun 2014 at 21:34

Do you have access to the webserver? Just set up the redirect within that. If it's an IIS7 webserver it's a 10 second job:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770409(v=ws.10).aspx

It wouldn't take much longer for other webservers like Apache / Tomcat either.

Catanonia · 3 Jun 2014 at 11:36

Hellsmk2 said:
Do you have access to the webserver? Just set up the redirect within that. If it's an IIS7 webserver it's a 10 second job:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770409(v=ws.10).aspx

It wouldn't take much longer for other webservers like Apache / Tomcat either.

This wouldn't allow the end user to type the alias details into thier browser as they would have to type the original address to hit the server

Yamahahahahaha · 3 Jun 2014 at 16:14

If they're in the same domain: Give the site a unique IP or make it the default page for that website in IIS. Add the URL, portal in this case, as an A record in AD DNS.

If they're not in the same domain I guess you'll have to do it as outlined here: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/434417-create-dns-alias-shortcut-to-external-site

For instance one of our internal sites is http://server/ServiceA/page.aspx - Instead we can just put in http://ServiceA and it takes you right there.

I'd only ever use it for 'important' sites, otherwise you'll end up using tons of IP ranges for every little thing.