Help on Domain name issues, please.

[Telford]

I have a problem accessing my own website - caused by my own stupidity.

I have a domain name registered with, and hosted by, BT. I Also have another couple registered with FreeParking.co.uk which are redirected to the webspace on BT - this all works fine for everybody in the world, except me!

The reason is, that when I updated my server to 2003 server I took the 'opportunity' to name my Active Directory with the same name as my main .co.uk domain name.

Ever since, any attempts to get to any of my registered domain name's web sites fail - cause they've been hijacked by Active Directory / IIS.

Other than renaming the active directory (a right pain, I believe) is there a simple way around this?

Any help appreciated.

Mark

 

[Kropotkin]

Add an entry to your hosts file mapping your website names to the IP addresses of the servers they are hosted on.

Alternatively, you may be able to point all of your servers to an external DNS name server to do DNS resolution (in TCP/IP properties), but I have no idea how this works in Active Directory.

But as you point out yourself, the best solution is to rename the active directory.

 

[mikeh501]

Alternatively, you may be able to point all of your servers to an external DNS name server to do DNS resolution (in TCP/IP properties), but I have no idea how this works in Active Directory.

This wont work. AD needs it own compatible (many ISP ones are not suitable) DNS server so it can update it etc.

The most permanent solution is to rename your AD, as your likely to run into the same issues if you ever want to handle your own mail etc in the future.

A quick fix however...

Instead of putting entries into every client machines host files, a better way would be to add a record to your local DNS server (Your server presumably, unless you have more than 1) which resolves "www" on your domain "xyz.com" to the IP or secondary hostname of the machine hosting your website. You might also want to add your ISP's DNS server to the list of fowarders in the DNS options. This way any entries your DNS server couldn't satisfy would be directed upstream to your ISP, and your local server caches the answer, thereby speeding up the response next time.

 

[Telford]

Thanks for the advice chaps.

I spent a couple of hours with the AD rename utilities yesterday and it appears I've got a right bag of worms - the old W2k server which was 'demoted' is no longer in existence and the new 2003 server can't elevate itself to the required level for Ad rename coz it thinks the W2k server still exists.

Tried the DSN forward lookup entries with all the DNS entries I could garner for the ISP but it didn't help (made it worse at one point).

I think a re-install is the sensible solution - all the data is on separate partitions so it should be pretty straight forward - only 5 clients.

Thanks again

Mark