I am developing a .Net Core REST API for an Android app which is written in Dart/Flutter, both .Net Core and android app are connected to the same local network, right now I am sending requests to server by using it's IP address, however I want to make it easy for end users to use the app since they have limited knowledge of configuring stuff.
How can I link a local domain to the server or at least use server name instead of ip address for sending requests, in that case it would have saved me a lot of time and hassle with end users.
Do I need a DNS server for this and is it easy to implement this functionality?
According to your description, you should set up a DNS server in your local network. If you want to access the app by using domain, you should make sure the android app is also inside that local network.
A DNS server is a computer server that contains a database of public IP addresses and their associated hostnames, and in most cases serves to resolve, or translate, those names to IP addresses as requested.
More details about how to set up a DNS server and configure a DNS server , you could refer to below article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/814591/how-to-install-and-configure-dns-server-in-windows-server-2003
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Updated the question:
Assume that i run several web applications in one windows server under IIS. As you know, for the several web applications to co-exist in IIS, i need to differentiate them using a hostname, ip address or port combinations. Assuming that i go with defining a hostname binding unique for each of the web applications, do i need to create a DNS entry for the hostnames to be resolved?
There are three different sites i host in IIS in the same windows server. I can not allocate different ip address to each of my dev sites so i chose to use unique host names for each of the sites thus
api-orders.dev
api-catalog.dev
api-products.dev
etc..
api - indicates it is a web api.
orders | catalog | products - indicate it is an application serving a business department.
dev - indicates it is my development site.
My organization has several domains such as usdev.org.com, us.org.com, uk.dtt.org.com and more like.
Assuming that my Dev servers are hosted in the usdev.org.com domain. I should be able to request my hypothetical sites from within and also outside of the usdev.org.com domain
right now, when i use the below urls, i am not able to hit the site within or outside the domain. Not even from the web server where the sites are hosted. I ask this question to several people and could not get a clear response.
DO i need to create DNS entries corresponding to the hostname IIS binding of each site in order to solve this issue?
api-orders.dev.computer-name.domain.com
api-catalog.dev.computer-name.domain.com
api-products.dev.computer-name.domain.com
What kind of setup i need to acheive this?
If you just want to access the website via your Active directory. I think you shouldn't include servername in your domain name.
Because in common AD DNS Forward Lookup Zone.
You should have a primary zone called domain.com. Your web server will displayed as a HOST(A) Servername and its FQDN will be servername.domain.com.
Then you could create a CNAME api-orders.dev and map it to your servername.domain.com. The FQDN should be api-orders.dev.domain.com.
Finally you have to set the domain into IIS binding so that IIS can share 80 port for mutiple sites.
Since your cname api-orders.dev will not be considered as a seperate website, you have to input FQDN instead of CNAME.
If you want to access the website from internet, then you may need to purchase public domain from domain provider and map it to your server's public IP address.
I've been trying all day to set up my instance of TFS2017 to work with HTTPS.
I've read the official setup guide, but it didn't help much.
My instance is attached to a domain and configuration has been made with an Administrators group user. The domain account is referenced as an administration console user properly.
The setup has been made with default 8080 port and domain account user can access the website as expected (hosted at http://machine-name:8080/tfs)
Now, when I change the IIS website settings binding to use HTTPS on port 443 with a valid wildchar certificate + set the hostname to be tfs.mydomain.com + ask for SSL require, I cannot have my user to authenticate anymore.
I make TFS Public Url point to https://tfs.mydomain.com/tfs.
I get prompted for the authentication box, but after many attempts, the site would just fail with 401.
The tests are made into the server environment to avoid Firewall confusions.
My instance has two network cards with 2 separate networks. First resolves to public IP, second resolves to private IP. I noticed the configuration works with the machine names, while it fails with the DNS resolution on the public IP. Could this be a reason ?
Thanks for your help
To perform the procedures in your requirements, you must first meet some prerequisites such as required Permissions and so on. Please double check this first. Also please make sure you have set up the corresponding ports such as below prompted.
Important:
The default port number for SSL connections is 443, but you
must assign a unique port number for each of the following
sites: Default Website, Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Team
Foundation Server Proxy (if your deployment uses it), and SharePoint
Central Administration (if your deployment uses SharePoint).
You should record the SSL port number for each website that you
configure. You will need to specify these numbers in the
administration console for Team Foundation.
There is a very detail tutorial about configuring HTTPS with SSL, please refer Setting up HTTPS with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for Team Foundation Server
To narrow down the issue with IP, you could disable one of your two network cards. Give a test with only using one network card each time.
I have developed an IOT module which can connect to the Wi-Fi and send data to the internet, the module can send data (string) to specific IP address on the specific port.
The internet server should store that information to the data base and display that information to the user via HTTP (web page).
When I set the port to the 9081 (any random number) and my local computer IP address as IP address that module should send data to, I can see data on my local computer terminal.
My question is that how can I send that data to the internet?
What I have in mind is that I can purchase domain name, host and develop a web site (HTTP) which by default listen to port 80. The service provider only give me a basic services such as HTTP, HTTPS and FTP which make it possible to upload website and I don’t have access to other protocols and ports.
Should I purchase virtual private server or I should use any specific cloud services or the module can send data to the server on port 80 without getting conflict with web pages and web contents?
Please give me some suggestion.
I did something similar with an IoT module. There are two options that I also considered. Before we describe, there is no need to buy a domain name. You can comfortably use the IP address to connect to. If you have some spare cash go for it.
Send everything to the web server on your local computer. To have access to the local computer you must enable port 80 to be accessible over the internet. You do this on a router. This is called port forwarding. You setup a rule such that all the requests made to your IP address on port 80 should be redirected to your local computer on whatever port the web server is listening to. This is the cheapest method available. Also, there is an important limitation: you're local computer needs to be switched on all the time if you want to access the data.
Buy a droplet (virtual private server). The workflow is the same as 1, but you don't need to port forwarding anything. These are usually setup and ready to use. However, this is usually expensive. Most of these providers offer pay-as-you-go services (e.g., Digital Ocean is the one that I used). There are other providers which offer free but limited versions. These are usually developer trial versions. If you go over a number of transactions, or space, you will have to pay (have a look at Parse).
If I log in to our web server using RDP, I can't access any of the sites we run on that web server via their external url. For example, say my web server hosts www.example.com, when I log in to the web server, bring up a browser and try to go to www.example.com, I can't see it.
However, one of our sites was configured in some way to work like this, if I try to go to that url, it works as you might expect.
Unfortunately, this was done by our server hosting partners, who we are no longer in contact with. Does anyone know how this can be achieved?
You can do it in many way..
It depends on your network configuration, but it could also be a simple row in hosts file or a static dns record or a specific route for that ip address.
if you're using IIS you should also set the website to "listen" on the loopback interface in the bindings menu.
or, for IIS 6:
I created an AMP web application that was originally going to be served from a traditional 3rd party host.
As we finished up, the client decided to host it internally, on a server in their office network. The application is only meant to be available to staff members, but those staff members will often be off-site. I had no involvement in setting up their network, which uses at least one server running windows server 2003. The client machines I saw were XP.
I set up Apache, MySQL and PHP on the server 2003 machine, and installed the application. The application is built on the CodeIgniter framework, so I set the base_url to the internal IP (192.168...), and we tested from within the network. Everything worked fine.
Next, we asked their network guy to open port 80 for apache. I set the base_url to the external IP, and tested from my home (using the external IP as the web address), and it works fine.
However, when attempting to access the application using the external IP from within the network, they're unable to connect. I can reset the base_url to the network IP, and they can access it using the network IP, but then it the application fails when connecting externally (since the base_url, used throughout the application, is pointing to the internal IP).
It suppose I could let CodeIgniter determine the base_url (by leaving the variable as an empty string), but would rather figure out why the external IP fails in-network, and try to correct that.
The server we're using is not dedicated to the AMP stack (in fact, it has at least one other application broadcasting to the internet that must have been using IIS, as well as an FTP server used for office scanners), so I suppose there might be some conflicts there.
I know very little about windows networking. A quick search suggested this might be because of NAT, but didn't offer a work-around.
Their network guy has no suggestions, and said that everything should be fine.
Is it possible to have users inside the network access the Apache server using the external IP, and if so, what needs to happen to enable that?
TYIA
Your client's NAT router is configured to forward packets arriving on its external interface for its external IP with port 80 to the internal machine, port 80, after re-writing the source and destination IP addresses in the packets.
From within the network, attempts to connect to the external IP address will be routed to the default route on the machines, the router's internal interface. This interface is not configured to forward packets back into the network.
Configure the application to listen on all IP addresses. Make sure that the server knows that the clients know it under several hostnames -- the internal IP address and the external IP address.
You might be able to re-write the NAT firewall rules on the router to perform the port forwarding for the internal interface as well, but off-the-shell equipment common in homes and small businesses do not make this task easy. More expensive gear (or home-built *BSD/Linux router machines) can do this without much effort, but it would needlessly add traffic to the router.
This isn't Apache related, nor is it CI related. It's often impossible to reach the external IP address from within the network.
Frankly, I don't know exactly why that is. I do know that it's related to how NAT (Network Address Translation) works or at least how it's implemented.
For a detailed overview of why this is, you should ask this question on serverfault. If you're simply a programmer who has to deal with it, accept that NAT usually works only from inside to outside and outside to inside, but not inside to inside.
You already mentioned one of the solutions in your question - don't use base_url. You could also simply run the server on an external IP address (not your company IP, but let's say a datacenter or something).