Re: Hosting multiple websites

Chris wrote:
> These three addresses resolve to their own unique IP address.
> However, they are all hosted on the same physical machine, therefore
> this only has 1 IP address.. (a LAN ip)

You have a NAT router/firewall in between, which listens on 3 public IPs on
the WAN side and forwards port 80 on each to the same private IP address on
the LAN or DMZ side. Do I have that right?

> the firwall points it to the webserver, where the host headers sort
> out what is going on. Now, it all goes wrong if someone tries to
> use these sites unique IPs.. due to the server getting no host
> header info..

You can do this one of two ways:

1) Assign the server additional private addresses. You can do this in
TCP/IP properties for the local area connection, Advanced button. Modify
your firewall port forwarding as follows:

1.2.3.4:80 (public IP #1) -> 192.168.1.4:80 (private IP #1)
1.2.3.5:80 (public IP #2) -> 192.168.1.5:80 (private IP #2)
1.2.3.6:80 (public IP #3) -> 192.168.1.6:80 (private IP #3)

Configure your IIS websites to listen on a different address each, no
specific host headers. Don't forget to modify your internal DNS if the
sites are accessed internally using private addressing.

2) The above is the preferred solution. However, if you have good reasons
to keep the server on single IP address, you can bind each site to a unique
port. In that case, your port forwarding would look like this:

1.2.3.4:80 (public IP #1) -> 192.168.1.4:8001 (site #1)
1.2.3.5:80 (public IP #2) -> 192.168.1.4:8002 (site #2)
1.2.3.6:80 (public IP #3) -> 192.168.1.4:8003 (site #3)

If the sites are accessed internally using the private address, then you
will want to create a second set on port 80 and using the host headers as
you have currently -- for internal user use only, so that they don't need to
use "site1.address.com:8001" in the URL.


--
Chris Priede


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