Question : General Confusion About IIS and DNS

Hi,

Currently in my test environment I am running OWA on port 443 so the phones can sync over the air with exchange 2003. In the future though we might want to run sharepoint over ssl as well as OWA on the same SBS server. I found a way online to force iis to run several website on the same port, which I guess is what I want. But when I come in from the outside, how will the router that does NAT know to pass certain traffic to the sharepoint site instead of OWA, as its all the same IP?

I would make each site run on a different NIC/IP, and then make an entry on our hosts dns to point to the different IP, but we only have a single static IP on the internet, so I am stuck again not knowing how to address the traffic.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer : General Confusion About IIS and DNS

Hey,

For HTTP web sites Host Headers will split responses sent to the same IP address to different sites. For instance you might have:

www.domain1.com   ->   1.2.3.4
www.domain2.com   ->   1.2.3.4

If you had two web sites configured with Host Headers the first would use www.domain1.com and only respond when that name is passed in the HTTP Header. Likewise for www.domain2.com on a separate web site in IIS.

This falls apart when SSL comes along.

Using SSL for HTTPS will need each site to have a separate IP end-point. This is because the secure channel is negotiated before names or identities of web sites can be discussed.

For SSL sites that gives you two choices:

1. Either request additional public IP Addresses
2. Or use different ports (https defaults to 443, but you could use htts://othersite.domain.com:444)

HTH

Chris