I am a programmer in a small ASP.NET shop with very little expirience in server administration, and I have to setup IIS 7.5 to host lot of sites on newly installed windows server 2008 R2, these sites are test "clones" for sites on "real" web server and they should be accessible only in local network (domain). Developers should add new sites for our new customers. Project managers use this server to check progress and test new sites and new features, QA people have to have access to this site and test before we copy it to the "real" web server.
Developers only have access to IIS console, in fact they can use RDP to test server with their developer domain credentials and permissions, also developers are local admins on that machine (tester).
On our previous server I used different port numbers for each site. That worked but don't like this solution, I would prefer to use subdomains. But here are the problems:
manually adding DNS records is not an option because we do not wont that developers have to administer domain DNS server, and currently this had to be done with domain administrator credentials. Is there a some way to add DNS record automatically ?
I tried to add DNS record for subdomains on test server with wildcard (*.tester) and that seems to work for some time but that change coused some bad problems in our domain network and admin forbid me to mess with DNS, he said that I have to add DNS record for every subdomain manually and that I can not use wildcards, and there is nothing that I can do about it, mainly for "politicall" reasons :(
obviously our admin is pretty much uncooperative, outsorced from different organization and I can't do anything about that.
can I add another DNS server on that machine ? What must be setup on clients machines to "tell" them to use domain DNS server and tester domain server ?
So please I need someone to give me some advice, what should I do ? Is different port numbers only option left ?
Thanks !