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To be up front, I'm developer who is mildly dangerous with server configs....when it goes right, else I'm more than useless. So here's the setup. I have a server whose sole purpose to to host a single RESTful application. I have created that as a Site in IIS. Now, an external DNS has been setup as a subdomain (by our lone Tech Ops guy) which is services-qa.domain.com. This is NOT in the internal DNS, so that being said I'm stuck. If I create a regular site in IIS I can use some internal DNS to resolve http://internalfoo/bar.html. But how is this done when I don't have an internal DNS?

Is it possible to just have all traffic to that server (via IP) bind to the site without a host name? I guess I can remove the Default Web Site and that'll do it?

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So lost...

1 Answer 1

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There are two ways to do this:

  1. Just access it via IP. Based on that screenshot, your IIS is not configured to care about host headers.
  2. Systems secret: All modern OSes have a tiny hidden DNS database! It's called a hosts file and it stores some hard-coded name-to-IP mappings. Modify your hosts file at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and add a line like this:

    IP.of.your.site services-qa.domain.com

Please note that this overrules all other settings, no matter what DNS server you set for yourself in IPv4 settings. Leave a post-it or something on your monitor to remind you of this. If you're getting crazy DNS issues, check your modified hosts file first.

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  • so I has tried this on a whim earlier and it didn't work. BUT I ahve no clue what I'm doing. So the internal IP is 10.0.1.19 and we don't care about the external IP for this right now I don't think. If I leave things as they are (and get the hosts to work), 10.0.1.9/Services-QA/Restful/stuff/here should just work right? In theory that's all that's needed? There is an external IP but I don't want to deal with that right now, I just want to be able to access this via the IP.
    – bryan
    Feb 6, 2012 at 20:34
  • side note, does accessing off the straight IP mean I need this in the default site as an application?
    – bryan
    Feb 6, 2012 at 20:35
  • Quick answer: If IIS is doing what you want, you're all set! The default site doesn't have any inherently special meaning to IIS. It's really more of a "site that's enabled out of the box to serve c:\inetpub\wwwroot." You've already modified the site and the directory structure to serve out your application. Feb 6, 2012 at 22:22

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