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My active directory domain's name is "mywebsite.com" instead of "mywebsite.local". I had to do this as a workaround to other issues, and to change it will be a pain. When people inside of my company visit "mywebsite.com", it redirects to our DC instead of our website. How can I make it redirect to our website?

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5 Answers 5

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You can't.

You can define any hostname or subdomain you want in your AD's main DNS zone, but for AD to work properly, the A records for the domain itself must point to your domain controllers.

So, having "www.mywebsite.com" pointing to your web site is fine, but having "mywebsite.com" do the same is not.


Addendum: hosting your web site on your DC would of course fix the issue, but I strongly advise you against that; DCs are definitely not meant to host web sites.

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    In case your addendum is in response to my answer - I wasn't suggesting hosting the sites on the DCs, but rather installing IIS and hosting a redirect to www.site.com, which will work, but is definitely putting a bandaid on a broken arm. :)
    – MDMarra
    Feb 14, 2012 at 23:05
  • @MDMarra: not directly related... more oriented to prevent someone from actually doing that :-)
    – Massimo
    Feb 14, 2012 at 23:27
  • I cheated a little, and made my domain controller webpage redirect to www.mywebsite.com. This worked perfectly Thank you!!!
    – Reid
    Feb 16, 2012 at 4:40
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You really shouldn't use the .local TLD (or any made up TLD) or the address of a public website. You should use a sub-domain of a domain that you already own (i.e. internal.mywebsite.com).

The best thing to do is rename your Active Directory Domain. You can't do this if you have Exchange 2007 or 2010 installed, but you can certainly reinstall it in the new domain.

If you don't want to do a rename, which is really the best thing to do, you can do some voodoo like install IIS on all of the DCs that redirect to the external site, but that's a bad fix. Really, just do a domain rename and learn from your mistake.

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    I think a little expansion on WHY they shouldn't use a .local or other made up TLD would be useful.
    – HostBits
    Feb 14, 2012 at 23:06
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    The short version is: Hard to get 3rd party SSL certificates for internal use. .local and others aren't reserved. At the rate that ICANN is selling TLDs, there's reason to think that your .local domain might be owned by someone else some day, causing a similar problem to this. It causes mDNS (bonjour) problems with OS X clients on the network. And, to top it off, it's just plain wrong!
    – MDMarra
    Feb 14, 2012 at 23:22
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    @Massimo I completely agree. Microsoft has (thankfully) done a 180 on their position. With ICANN's buy-your-own-tld hair-brained scheme, it's only a matter of time before someone owns .local and all of these admins end up in tears.
    – MDMarra
    Feb 14, 2012 at 23:28
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    @MDMarra though I strongly agree with you (especially on the non-reserved non-public TLD argument), I wouldn't say that it's "Hard to get 3rd party SSL certificates for internal use.". I've had UC certs issued from VeriSign, GoDaddy, Thawte and (mis)TrustWave, all with non-public SAN's, no problem Feb 15, 2012 at 2:26
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    @Ian can you cite the relevent RFC?
    – MDMarra
    Feb 15, 2012 at 18:00
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I always name my internal ad domains ad.companyname.com so I'm

  1. not using .local or a made up TLD.
  2. using a real TLD so I can get appropriate Certs and avoid DNS issues.
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  • Men! the best answer in this topic! Aug 17, 2016 at 8:56
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I'm going to repeat what uSlacker has mentioned above with a bit more detail as what he says will work. The rather pedantic arguments above are valid but I'll let you decide on whether you want a solution today or would prefer to spend several risky days migrating your domain or renaming it.

Its not much of a problem - you should be able to do this in 30 mins or less. It will not affect the operation of AD in the slightest.

  1. Add an entry in your local dns server on your DC for www (www.mywebsite.com). Put the public ip of your public web site.
  2. Install iis on your dc (if you have more than one you will need to do this on each one)
  3. On the default web page (of each dc) modify index.htm so that it redirects to www.mywebsite.com

Anyone in the office who types www.mywebsite.com will directly open the public site.

Anyone who types mywebsite.com will open the default web page on the DC and it will redirect to www.mywebsite.com

You could be more sophisticated and create an IIS site with a header of mywebsite.com and put the redirect there so as not to modify the default web site. If you already host other web apps on your DCs then this would be cleaner. Your call.

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I believe you can make this work, but it adds a bit of risk to your setup. You would need to add IIS to your domain controllers. Then redirect the index.asp to www.yourdomain.com. If you have multiple DCs, you'd need it on each.

I do not recommend this approach, but instead tell folks is cannot work as we have done. However I realize business needs may mandate a solution.

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  • This answer doesn't really add anything of value. Both Massimo and I covered this approach long before you posted this, and your post doesn't contain any new information/suggestions, making it noise.
    – MDMarra
    Feb 15, 2012 at 13:59
  • Your answer started with why he shouldn't use .local which, IMO, is off-topic. Massimo's started with "you can't" which is just wrong. Then the answers move on the to reality and finally get around to an answer in the comments. I thought I'd try to directly answer the OP's question.
    – uSlackr
    Feb 15, 2012 at 14:27
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    Then you didn't read either of our answers completely, I say that he can install IIS on the DCs and do a redirect and Massimo says something similar. Also, it's a little presumptuous to assume that his start page is index.asp. Massimo's answer is correct. You can't do what the OP wants. You can work around it with IIS redirects or hosting a copy of your site directly on the DCs, but you cannot just tell internal clients of a mydomain.com AD to connect to an external mydomain.com web server when they're using a browser, but still have AD work correctly.
    – MDMarra
    Feb 15, 2012 at 14:30

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