IIS 7 PORT 80 turned off

Question

I have a web server with the following:

IIS 7 Windows Server 2008

I currently have both PORT 80 and PORT 443 open to the outside world. I want to shut off PORT 80 and force every site to use PORT 443. I have a SSL cert installed and it uses PORT 443.

Now to my question. I've been using the instructions on the following URL with great success.http://www.jppinto.com/2010/03/automatically-redirect-http-requests-to-https-on-iis7-using-url-rewrite-2-0/

But, I assume that if I turn off PORT 80 my site(s) will not work because the site has to load in order to execute the procedure above, forwarding the user to the new HTTPS url.

Am I right?

Is there anyway I can set this up so if PORT 80 is closed, my sites will automatically forward? Maybe some type of DNS entry?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

No. To forward from 80 to 443, you'll need something listening on 80.

Answer 2

I create a new web site on the server to explicitly listen on port 80. The new web site is a simple splash page or a redirect to the SSL page. This way I can relax just a little bit because there really is no way to get sensitive information without using the SSL pages. You still end up running the non-SSL service on the SSL web site but you change the port to something else that the firewall doesn't allow.