Force Internal Website

I

Ianvn

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Location
Pretoria
Our company host our own website.
I have been trying to get everyone on our network to use our site through the network in stead of the internet. We use adsl to host the site - so if I can get everyone internally to use the network path it will just save a lot of bandwidth in the end.

example: Using http://[servername] instead of http://www.website.co.za
Is there a way to do the setup in ISA or in group policy on the domain to always force the network path instead of the external name?
 
You can use the hosts file and have that website point to the internal network IP address.
 
Thanks for your reply.

Is there anyway to "automate" this. I don't really want to go around to 30machines and edit their host file if I their is an easier way?

Wont putting it in the host file prevent people using laptops from accessing the website when they are not at the office?
 
as conradl said, we do the same at our work...use your dns so that internal machines get the local address when querying the .co.za site.
 
Create a DNS pointer to point http://www.website.co.za to the local address.... Changing the hosts file will bugger up remote access to the website.
Click to expand...

as conradl said, we do the same at our work...use your dns so that internal machines get the local address when querying the .co.za site.
Click to expand...

I'm not to clued up on DNS settings. I assume I need to go to the DNS under Forward lookup zones right click on my zone and "New Host (A)"?

The zone that I add the host to - does it need to be the same one as the website domain? Because right now our DNS is setup with one zone that corresponds to our AD domain. But that differs from our website domain.

I also assume that when everything is working 100% I should get the internal IP of my webserver when I ping www.website.co.za ?
 
Yes, you need to create an A record and then when you ping your website from inside your network, the internal IP should resolve.
 
The users with laptops will not be able to connect remotely if they have an edited host file....
 
Conradl said:
The users with laptops will not be able to connect remotely if they have an edited host file....
Click to expand...

I misunderstood you then, I thought you meant users from outside the network accessing the site. Let us know how it goes, Ianvn.
 
Thanks for all the help guys.
Everything seems to be working 100%

After setting up the host record in our DNS I was a bit confused when seeing that the website still goes to our external address but when doing a ping it resolves to our internal address. I upload a 52MB file to the site under 15sec so I assume that even though it is saying http://www.website.co.za in the browser address bar, it is actually going internal.

One last question that I do have though. If for some reason I want it to go "outside" (not use the internal server) when I enter our website address, is there an easy way to bypass the change I just made to our DNS?
 
broadly speaking, the hosts file take precedence over the internal dns, which in turn takes precedence over external dns

if this is just to test the site is accessible etc, copy your original hosts file, then edit the copy to point to the external ip address for www.yoursite.co.za, then make a little batch file to copy the hosts file around between original and edited version

or just manually edit it when you want to have an external look...settings in %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts override internal dns and external dns
 
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