Topic: Remove www, mail as hostnames

[Kelvin]

I need a little help on something.

I found that e-smith creates a few default aliases for items like www and mail (ie. if you ping www you get the e-smith server, if you ping mail, you get the e-smith server, etc). This sometimes proves to be a problem. Eg. say you have a website hosted externally by a webhost. From your local LAN, if you typed in www.yourdomain.com you get the e-smith server instead of your website on the web host. Similarly, the e-mail. If mails are being hosted by the mail / web / domain host, which means anyone@yourdomain.com should go to the domain host. However, from the LAN, e-smith takes the role of yourdomain.com.

We would like to keep e-smith's domain name as yourdomain.com as this would enable it to distribute the multi-drop mails for the LAN accounts. However, we would like any reference to mail.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com, etc (you get the idea) to refer to the mail / web / domain hosting company.

Any attempt to delete mail or www from the hostnames page on e-smith-manager does nothing as e-smith simply puts it back.

Any and all help greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Kelvin

[Graeme Robinson]

Kelvin, hi.
You can't delete these hosts but you can redirect them by altering the IP address as desired, to the real external host. In the manager / hostnames section.

[Casey]

Graeme,

This is an interesting issue. As posted earlier, I have bigpond cable put in recently. Based on what Kelvin wrote, I did a quick test and as expected, trying to get to http://www/ brings up the web site in the e-smith server. However, I now realise that this also means that I cannot get to Bigpond's account administration web pages either ! All links to the cable account maintenance / admin pages start with http://www/......

This is a BIG problem.

Any ideas ?

Casey

[Gregg]

I have my primary webserver working perfectly.  I created a virtual domain and it works perfectly.  I then went to a redirection service to create a redirect to my virtual domain.  I own a domain name and the redirection service is supposed to redirect it to my virtual domain.  Since, there is a www on my redirection, it jumps to my primary website.  If I type www1.mydomain.com, then it works.  Actually, xxx.mydomain.com works, except for the predefined www, ftp, and mail.  I have been looking at the templates, but I cannot find where this is defined.  Now I have to start looking at the scripts.  If someone has already corrected this, then I would greatly appreciate it.  I hate re-inventing stuff.

[Jochen Hoegerl]

Hi Kelvin,

I did it this way....

Let's say my ISP-hosted domain is myDomain.com

So I set up e-smith to be myDomain.local
I created a virtual domain myDomain.com (to get the multidrop mail )

I then went to Hostnames and added the FQDN's of my ISP-hosted services

www.myDomain.com and point it to its RealWorld IP-Address.
( Yes you have to type the complete address as hostname )

So if somebody in your internal net types "www.myDomain.com" in his/her

browser he will go to your External Website at your ISP.

If he just types www he gets your e-smith site. This is because you NEED

fully qualified domain names, so if you just provide a hostname to your

DNS he will automatically add a domain and guess what, it's the one you

gave your esmith or set up as virtual domain and thats why you always see

your internal Site.

Hope this helps

jochen

[Gregg]

Seems that I cured the problem, by clearing all the caches in on my clients and my server.

[Graeme Robinson]

The issue of ISP predefined hosts is annoying, but I get around it this way:
1. configure my ESSG correctly for the external hosts and do not point it to Telstra's upsteam proxy server.
2. add the domain suffix vic.bigpond.net.au ( for adsl users ATM - this may vary)
to the advanced tcp/ip properties on your client pc.
3. configure client pc's browser to use the ESSG as the proxy and then for acces to the Telstra www host change this to "direct connection to the internet".  For convenience I leave my least used browser so configured.  It's annoying but not a big problem.

This issue has been discussed earlier.  The problem is definitely Telstras in pre-configuring their dns for downstream clients who want/use fully qualified domains and servers, which given they are providing a business service, I consider they should allow for.