DNS Record / SSL / redirect

Question

I wonder if anyone is able to point me in the right direction?

We want to setup a sub domain on our server which points to an IP of a second server which is providing some checkout functionality for us.

So when a customer types sub-domain.ourDomainName they see a web page hosted by server.TheOtherDomain. We think this bit is easy enough with DNS, right?

But, we also want to enable SSL, so our certificate is for sub-domain.ourDomainName but we understand that the certifcate will fail browser validation as a reverse lookup is performed on the IP of the web site - and the reverse lookup will return server.TheOtherDomain..

We maybe looking at this incorrectly, but any advise on options would be much appreciated.

Steve

Note: migrated from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3370775/dns-record-ssl-redirect

Answer 1

certifcate will fail browser validation as a reverse lookup is performed on the IP of the web site

No - AFAIK there is no PTR DNS lookup for standard cerificate validation, it just checks that the common name on the certificate matches the hostname in the URL (and of course the expiry date, CA signature etc).

So if the server is accessed via https://sub-domain.ourDomainName then as long as the common name on the certificate is sub-domain.ourDomainName then it will work as expected (you can get wild card certificates e.g. matching *.ourDomainName but they are very expensive).

C.

Answer 2

A non-elegant solution may be the use of HTML tag IFRAME.

https://sub-domain.domain.com/index.html contains