www.mydomain.com Vs mydomain.com

[Oyeve]

Ok, so, the company I am the IT manger for has a website that needs to have the WWW in front of it, then you can just use the domain name once you get a cookie. The newly hired marketing chick wants to remove the WWW need but the domain name is the same as our email and company domain. I can switch it but we cant get to our site from within the domain. Our terminal server uses the same domain as well. I would rather leave the www need but she says it would look better on publications without the www. Is there a way to acheive this without breaking any DNS stuff?

We have an internal Exchange server that uses the same domain name.

 

[smitbret]

I though that "www." was deprecated and no longer necessary at all.

 

[Oyeve]

I though that "www." was deprecated and no longer necessary at all.

Depends. Our exchange server email uses the same domain name as the website.

 

[kevnich2]

Well technically speaking, domain.com and www.domain.com are two different DNS entries. www is simply a host record that is usually it's own A record but can also be a cname as well. My preference is to ALWAYS use www for the website and I actually put a record on whatever server the root A record is at so that all web requests for domain.com actually get sent to www.domain.com

As far as affecting email though, that's all through mx records. Your webmail login page is usually it's own cname or A record as well.

So in essence, what she's wanting is do-able, but in web development, most people I know of ALWAYS prefer the www. record being entered for websites. But again, as far as your DNS, terminal server or email, this shouldn't have any affect on it, if the dns is handled properly.

The DNS just handles the mapping from your domain records to the actual servers where the requests are sent to. Also keep in mind that DNS and web servers are entirely separate functions.

 

[Beer4Me]

If you're external DNS doesn't have the @ A record pointing to the same IP as "WWW" A record, then "mydomain.com" will fail. Exchange is unaffected by this.
Exchange (assuming 2010 and up) really only cares about Autodiscover and whatever you're using for your external namespace for client connections i.e. mail.mydomain.com.

You'd probably get better responses on Spiceworks, Experts Exchange, and TechNet.

 

[MustISO]

I've seen this quite a bit when the local domain is called 123.com and they want the website to be the same thing. I believe this is called a split zone scenario and you can Google for possible resolutions. Whenever I've set up a network domain I always use .local to avoid this issue.

 

[Oyeve]

If you're external DNS doesn't have the @ A record pointing to the same IP as "WWW" A record, then "mydomain.com" will fail. Exchange is unaffected by this.
Exchange (assuming 2010 and up) really only cares about Autodiscover and whatever you're using for your external namespace for client connections i.e. mail.mydomain.com.

You'd probably get better responses on Spiceworks, Experts Exchange, and TechNet.

@ is pointing to the website. Autodiscover is pointing to exchange 2010.

 

[Elixer]

Ok, so, the company I am the IT manger for has a website that needs to have the WWW in front of it, then you can just use the domain name once you get a cookie. The newly hired marketing chick wants to remove the WWW need but the domain name is the same as our email and company domain. I can switch it but we cant get to our site from within the domain. Our terminal server uses the same domain as well. I would rather leave the www need but she says it would look better on publications without the www. Is there a way to acheive this without breaking any DNS stuff?

We have an internal Exchange server that uses the same domain name.

Maybe I am reading this wrong, but, couldn't you just do a redirect?
For example, if you are lucky enough to be running nginx on the server, then doing something like this will work out well.

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  whatever.com;
    return       301 http://www.whatever.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  www.whatever.com;
}

All that does is redirect http://whatever.com to http://www.whatever.com
That won't break DNS.

 

[Oyeve]

OK, i'm an idiot. There was never an issue at all. Internally, ie at mydomain.com we get the no direct under construction. Externally it works fine and that is all that matter. All the testing was done internally. Sorry guys, Sometimes us old timers get dumber. Testing externally from any internet will forward to the web site and not email.

 

[Scarpozzi]

OK, i'm an idiot. There was never an issue at all. Internally, ie at mydomain.com we get the no direct under construction. Externally it works fine and that is all that matter. All the testing was done internally. Sorry guys, Sometimes us old timers get dumber. Testing externally from any internet will forward to the web site and not email.

Not an idiot. It gets confusing when you have internal vs external addressing. In my organization, they still don't support domain.com to the web because of the very reasons you're talking about (autodiscover and AD/DC), but it works externally.

The fix/workaround is what Beer4Me stated. You need a webserver listening internally on the AD DC instance ports 80/443 to redirect to your real webserver, wherever it is.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I usually make sure that both work. Some people think you HAVE to put www. while some people know you don't have to. It's practically standard that both should just work.

Also AD domain != internet domain. I would use mydomain.local for AD to avoid any kind of confusion. Though it's easier said than done to change that.

 

[kevnich2]

Why not just add that zone to your local DNS server with the proper records that employees need to use for external systems, such as web server, that way internal employees can still access the necessary external web site and any other resources they may need?

 

[destrekor]

I usually make sure that both work. Some people think you HAVE to put www. while some people know you don't have to. It's practically standard that both should just work.

Also AD domain != internet domain. I would use mydomain.local for AD to avoid any kind of confusion. Though it's easier said than done to change that.

My company does something similar, but actually uses local.mydomain.com. I'm not sure I prefer that in comparison to using a non-public domain suffix.

 

[Enigma102083]

My company does something similar, but actually uses local.mydomain.com. I'm not sure I prefer that in comparison to using a non-public domain suffix.

using a sub-domain for active directory is now the current Microsoft best practice.

 

[Crusty]

using a sub-domain for active directory is now the current Microsoft best practice.

I once did an Internship with a company that used the .net version of their .com domain as their internal domain for AD. The only problem was that someone else actually owned the .net version....

The kicker was that whoever designed the network tried to put it into a Class B space but messed up and used 172.0.0.0/12 instead of 172.16.0.0/12...

 

[Enigma102083]

I once did an Internship with a company that used the .net version of their .com domain as their internal domain for AD. The only problem was that someone else actually owned the .net version....

The kicker was that whoever designed the network tried to put it into a Class B space but messed up and used 172.0.0.0/12 instead of 172.16.0.0/12...

I once had to clean up a AD Forrest where the previous contractor migrated them into mydomain.corp.com instead of corp.mydomain.com They did not actually own corp.com... Let's just say there were some really weird DNS problems.