Topic: Persistent internal www home page. How do I kill it?

[David Woolley]

Hi,
During installation, I created a rough home page using the server manager, just to have a look, but now, I cannot get any part of the internal network to access the real home page at our isp.  Internal machines keep loading my temp, internal home page.  Ive tried changing the e-smith domain name and host name, and Ive tried removing the www host name from this server.  Ive tried pointing the www host to our external isp ip address, but still my temp file persists.  How can I kill it?

Many thanks

David Woolley

[Robert Heaton]

Hi!

I had the same problem, on your SME server login as root, then try pinging the external domain name you want to access, eg) www.mycompany.com
And make sure it's *real* IP address and NOT the IP address of the local SME server.

If you can ping the *real* server at your ISP then great!

As fot the clients, make sure you have cleared the history, & the Temporary Internet files, and make sure they access the web via your SME proxy,
eg 192.168.1.1    Port: 3128


I had the same problem, but I found forcing the clients to use the proxy worked!

Hope this helps,
Rob.

[David Woolley]

Thanks for your reply, Robert.
I can ping the isp and get a reply,.
I had not considered clearing the temporary files, but that does, of course make sense.
Sadly, there's no improvement.
Do I need to set up something on the SME to use proxy server, just setting the client to access via the proxy gives unresolved dns.

Many thanks

David Woolley

[Robert Keith]

Out of curiosity, what is your homepage address? and what is the domain that you setup your SME Server to use.

From the sounds of things your real homepage is something like

www.mydomain.com

And you have told e-smith to manage the mydomain.com domain for your internal network. Hence when you go to www.mydomain.com, SME is resolving this to the IP of your SME Server. If you log into the SME Manager and look at the host settings I can almost guarantee that you will have an entry which matches your homepage.

All you need to do it tell SME that www.mydomain.com = your real ip in the real world

Hope the above makes sense. Feel free to email me your information, if you don't want it published in the forums.

regards

Robert Keith

[David Woolley]

You guys are really great, thank you.

I suppose one of the things I don't really understand is the function of loading an internet style domain into the sme server.  The server domain is editvideo.co.uk, but in the server-manager, I have deleted the www.editvideo.co.uk hostname.  Previously, I had set that sme hostname to external and included the isp ip address.

So I think I have followed the instructions, but the sme is still resolving to a host name it no longer has in its internal table.

Hmmm, I'm puzzled.

[Robert Keith]

You could try to restart the name service. This since the I am not sure how often the internal DNS updates.

You will need to SSH/Telnet into the server, become root and then issue the command:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/named restart

or it could be /etc/init.d/named restart

Or if you want to be sure all config options are loaded, and are not confident with using the command line you could reboot the server....

This should work...

[Jason Judge]

I had this problem a few days ago and posted to this forum. It turned out a reboot fixed the problem for me, though other people posted that they did not need a reboot.

I think strange things happen when user-manager is installed.

-- Jason

[Kelvin]

In general, you should not have deleted the www entry in the server manager's hostsnames section. I remember on ESSG 4.1.2, if you deleted the www entry, the server simply puts it back for you.

In SME 5 and above, you can delete it, but if you actually wanted it to point to your external web address, you should edit the entry (or modify - SME terminology), and tell SME that it is a remote address and then type in the global (the publicly accessible) IP address for www.yourdomain.com.

That will fix the problem (always has - and I've set up lots of them). If you have already deleted the www entry, just try creating a new one that points to your web site's global IP address.

Kelvin

[Andy MacDonald]

You may find that, unless you are using DHCP, the client computers will use the DNS cache on the e-smith box, and point you to the same address.
Make sure that your default gateway is set as the e-smith box.
Ensure you're using the e-smith proxy at first eg mybox.net.uk :3128
But the main thing to ensure is that the client boxes are using the isp's DNS, which normally gets handed over by DHCP.
I found I normally forgot to put it in when I static addressed them, and as I use various isp's, it's easier to make the internal addresses bound to the mac addresses via the Hostnames and addresses panel in server manager.

[Jason Judge]

The client PCs surely should be using the DNS cached on the SME box? I thought that's the whole idea: no need to go to the ISP for every lookup when it is held locally.

The problem of being given the wrong IP address by the SME box when the correct IP address has been defined on the same SME box is the fault of the SME box. If a local host name (e.g. www) is changed on the SME box then the old IP address should be flushed from the cache immediately and replaced by the new one. I think it is that mechanism that is failing in some cases, and only a reboot flushes that IP cache.

So if your client machines use the DNS at the ISP, does that mean your SME Server posts its DNS entries back to your ISP? If so, then this is a problem for some of us on cable as the cable companies don't tend to like their DNS being set by any client machine, at least BlueYonder here in the UK don't.

-- Jason

[David Woolley]

Thank you all so much for your help.

The e-smith server has been rebooted many times, all the .htm files visible to clients by way of sme shares have been deleted, the sme www host has been removed, but always the same local temp homepage is still displayed to local clients.

This cached page is being held by sme out of reach of server-manager and the workgroup shares.  I would like to delete the sme file and at least force a client error like "the page could not be found".  Then we would know which file is being found.

My isp tells me that my external homepage is held on a virtual server.  At first, I modified the sme www hostname to be "remote" and gave the ip reported by dos command tracert.   No improvement, so I then removed the sme hostname www.

Because this is a new installation with no data to lose, I think what I will try next is to reformat the hard drive and re-install from scratch - without making a temp homepage.  It does make me feel a bit out of control, though.

Thanks again

Best wishes

David Woolley