Providing access to a no-www website in an active directory environment

Posted by oasisbob on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by oasisbob
Published on 2010-06-11T23:30:43Z Indexed on 2010/06/11 23:33 UTC
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Filed under:

dns

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active-directory

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split-dns

Our website is hosted externally, off our network. The canonical URL is a is intentionally lacking www, and will 301 redirect any requests containing www to the canonical URL. So far, so good.

The problem is providing access to the website from within our LAN. In theory, the answer is simple: add a host record in DNS pointing foobarco.org to the external webhost. (eg foobarco.org --> 203.0.113.7)

However, Our active directory domain is the same as our public website (foobarco.org), and AD appears to periodically auto-create host (A) records in the domain root corresponding to our domain controllers. This causes obvious problems: users on the LAN attempting to access the website resolve the domain controllers instead.

As a stop-gap measure we're overriding DNS using the hosts file on clients, but this is a quick hack that doesn't scale well.

The hosts-file hack hasn't broken anything obvious, so I doubt that this behavior is essential to AD operations, but I haven't found a way to disable it.

Is it possible to override this behavior?

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