Question About Domain Name

[vedekandy]

Hi all,

 

I'm just wondering if I'm going about this the right way, and could use some advice from those more experienced in this!

 

The situation is this: I plan on running Server 2008 R2 as the domain controller, and get everyone on the internal network onto a roaming profile, with all users running Windows 7. I've already trialled this using 3 VMs (one Server, two clients) and everything works fine, but I just used ourcompany.testdomain as the domain name as it was only internal and pretty much just for fun!

 

Right now, our company hosts it's website (which is low usage) on a VPS elsewhere, and it handles the E-Mail and web traffic for the domain. Let's say the domain name is ourcompany.com (original, I know!). What I would LIKE to do, so that our users can connect from home/on laptops via VPN, is edit the DNS zone on the VPS so that internal.ourcompany.com points to the IP address of our DC (using an A record); therefore leaving the WWW and E-Mail traffic as it is, and just route anyone using internal.ourcompany.com through to the server. My questions are:

 

1) Is this the right way to do this? In fact, would this method even work, or am I way off track?

2) Would I need to name the domain "ourcompany.com" or "internal.ourcompany.com" for this to work?

3) If I decide to use Exchange later on, would it allow us to configure if for our @ourcompany.com address, or would that then necessitate all of the email being @internal.ourcompany.com if I needed to choose the second option of question 2?

 

I appreciate that this is a complex question, and I'm just trying to work out if I'm going the right way about this, or if there's a simpler option I've missed, such as having a completely different name for our domain, and just running a third-party mail server instead of Exchange. Or, worse case scenario, just host the site on the server, though I'm hoping not to go down that route!

 

Any advice would be much appreciated!

 

-AndyH

[F2 Staff]

You can do what you describe above. Just edit the dns so that www leads to the current server and then the .com leads to the internal server.

[vedekandy]

Hi there,

 

First of all, thank you very much for your reply! I'm sorry I wasn't able to respond; things have been hectic and thus far I haven't needed to implement this, and now that I try, I seem to be having some problems.

 

Currently I'm using a dummy domain I bought cheaply to test these things with, and the DNS Zone - through WHM on the VPS - looks like this:

 

myserver.co.uk. IN NS

myserver.co.uk. IN NS

myserver.co.uk. IN A 1.2.3.4

localhost IN A 127.0.0.1

myserver.co.uk. IN MX 0 myserver.co.uk.

mail IN CNAME myserver.co.uk.

www IN CNAME myserver.co.uk.

 

There are then other entries for ftp, whm, etc, which all specify the same IP as myserver.co.uk (listed here as 1.2.3.4).

 

I have tried to follow your suggestion, and make sure that WWW is still on the VPN but the non-WWW is shifted to the VPN.

 

Now, I understand how this works (at least, I think I do!) - but nothing seems to work 100%:

 

* If I change the myserver.co.uk A record, then the mail stops working - I can get the www to continue working by specifying the IP address as an A record, but the mail will either stop receiving, stop sending, or both.

* Changing the mail entry to an IP permits sending, but not receiving as the MX entry points to myserver.co.uk. which is now pointing at the VPN.

* I cannot change the MX entry to localhost, or to an IP address, as it generates an error.

* I cannot use @ as an A record to redirect all traffic that doesn't specify a prefix, as WHM changes it back to "myserver.co.uk.".

 

I've tried every combination of these and nothing seems to work, unfortunately. By changing the DNS Zone I can definitely keep WWW traffic on the server and push everything else through to the VPN server, but I cannot keep the E-Mail server running on the VPS server using this method - I can't change the MX entry to suit my needs.

 

Would it be easier to simply point the domain to our Server 2008 machine, and set up the DNS Zone on that to redirect all WWW and E-Mail traffic back over to the VPS? And would there be much of a penalty in efficiency, given that it's an extra "hop" on the route? Our site is fairly basic and uses nothing high-bandwidth anyway, but I want to be as efficient as possible!

 

Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated - thank you!

 

-AndyH