So lets say I have my home network (192.168.0.1 as gateway, with addresses up to 192.168.0.12).

Instead of typing in the name of the machine via IP, I want to give each system a name that I can type into a browser, and eventually have subdomains for services ON those particular systems.

For example:

I would like to have an internal domain called HERCULES on my network. If I went to HERCULES/PressMon, I would like it to direct to the HERCULES machine on port 8080 or something.


Is this what I would use DNS for?


I have a copy of Windows Server 2008 Std. on an academic license and I was hoping to setup DNS using IIS. Perhaps someone can recommend the best way of setting this sort of thing up.

DNS provides mappings of names (such as PressMon.HERCULES) to IP addresses, but does not play any part in determining which port to connect to when you access that address. In general, the port is determined by the protocol used (http goes to port 80, https to 443, ssh to 22, etc.) and you're generally not going to want to mess with that unless you're trying to add a little extra security through obscurity by 'hiding' the service on a non-standard port.

If you're dealing entirely with Windows machines (or non-Windows machines using samba), you may be able to use Windows domain or workgroup services instead, but I don't know Windows well enough to provide any detail on that.

well, I am trying to implement some software development services like JIRA and Fisheye (http://www.atlassian.com) on my home network. They don't run on the standard http ports (8080 and 8060, respectively). However, to avoid typing "192.168.0.XXX:8080" into the browser, I just wanted to type a name and have it redirect.

I know I can do this with HOSTS within windows, but I dont want to have to keep up a file for each system that logs onto the network.

Thanks for the help so far! More comments appreciated.

This is networking, & not software development, moved to networking


Are you using Apache? I've setup redirects in the vhosts configuration.

Unfortunately, I am not. The applications I am running are stand-alone, meaning they open with their own copy of Tomcat.

My OS is just a bare-bones install of Server 2008 Standard (x64). So any further suggestions would be appreciated.

Hey,

I have an idea of how you might be able to implement the kind of service that you want on your network. It's mostly guesswork though, as I've never implemented the sort of thing you are looking for.

You can use Active Directory & DNS to implement and manage domain names on your network. DNS servers support many different record types including one called SRV (location of service). Amongst other things SRV records let you specify port numbers for services running on a particular domain or sub domain.

In theory, you should be able to use a normal A record to name your computer running the target service and a SRV record to provide the port on which to connect. Your browser should then check DNS for any records and find both the A and SRV records automatically. It might be possible to use LDAP to manage these records through AD as well, although that's me guessing again

One thing to look out for - from the little bit of reading about of the net that I did it looks like SRV records might not be supported by some browsers so you might want to check before implementing all this. Sorry I couldn't be more specific - one of these days I'll stop being such a cheapskate and actually fork out for some Windows Server software

Hope this helps - Let us know if you get it working!

-N

This post has been edited by numeric: 7 May, 2009 - 03:30 PM

Thanks so much for the idea. I will def. give that a try! Hopefully everything is compliant with Firefox 3 and IE7 (or 8). That is what I, myself, use and what anyone at my home developing with me will be using.

Networking is so freaking complicated! I have a few friends who do it for a living but dont live nearby, maybe I can convince them to spend a day getting all this set up

More thoughts welcome, thanks!