HomeDoor Users' Guide

Appendix 1 - A HomeDoor Setup Example

This appendix presents a complete example of a HomeDoor setup, including both HomeDoor and DNS configuration. DNS configuration may vary based on the particular DNS you are using.

This example assumes you want to serve two additional default home pages (and their associated virtual domains) in addition to the actual default home page of the Web server itself.

MacDNS users: notes specific to MacDNS are included using a format just like this.

The actual Web server's name is assumed to be www.yourwebserver.com at address 10.0.0.254, and the desired default home pages are assumed to be http://www.companyX.com and http://www.companyY.com. This example further assumes that you have registered the domains yourwebserver.com, companyX.com and companyY.com with the InterNIC. Details on how to register domain names are available at http://ds.internic.net. You only need to register these domain names if your pages are going to be accessed across the Internet. If your pages will only be accessed locally, domain name registration is not required.

Step 1. Acquire additional IP addresses for your default home pages. Although these addresses do not have to be consecutive, they do have to be within a range of 255 addresses from each other. We'll assume the addresses you are given are 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2. These addresses must be valid for the network on which the HomeDoor Macintosh will be placed.

Step 2. Configure your DNS to point the name www.companyX.com to the address 10.0.0.1 and www.companyY.com to 10.0.0.2. The files CompanyXHosts.txt and CompanyYHosts.txt are sample hosts files which you could use to do this configuration. You should first look at the file HomeDoorSampleHosts.txt, which is assumed to be the base host file, normally called simply "hosts" . This file contains general comments on the format of a DNS hosts file.

MacDNS users: In addition to the above listed sample hosts files, HomeDoor ships with sample hosts files specifically for use with MacDNS (MacDNS actually calls these files "zone" files). These files, which can not be read directly by a Web browser, are yourwebserver.com. , CompanyX.com. and CompanyY.com. If placed in the same folder as MacDNS, these files will be opened when MacDNS is run, and can be edited to match your desired configuration.

Step 3. Configure your DNS with DNS aliases to your actual Web server. These aliases, which are not strictly necessary, are used so that the "location" field, displayed in many Web browsers, shows the original domain name as opposed to your actual server's domain name. Specifically, configure your DNS so that www2.companyX.com and www2.companyY.com are both aliases to www.yourwebserver.com. See the CNAME statements in the sample hosts files for details.

MacDNS users: MacDNS does not support cross-domain aliases. As indicated in the sample MacDNS files, you must create permanent host records in place of aliases.

Step 4. If desired, configure your DNS with mail host information for the CompanyX and CompanyY virtual domains. This step is only necessary if you will be providing mail service to these virtual domains and wish to be able to have mail addresses of the form name@CompanyX.com. You will also need to configure your mail server to accept mail to these domains.

Step 5. Configure reverse lookup information into your DNS. Reverse lookup information, as shown in the ReverseZones.txt file, is used to map IP addresses back to domain names. This step is in no way necessary, and in fact will only work if you are the only one providing primary name service for your domain. If your ISP is providing any primary name service for your domain, they must handle reverse lookup information.

MacDNS users: MacDNS automatically provides reverse lookup information. No additional configuration is required in this step.

Step 6. Create folders on your Web server for the CompanyX and CompanyY home pages and virtual domains. We'll assume you create folders called CompanyX and CompanyY, respectively, at the root of your Web server. Create files called default.html (or whatever your server's default home page file name is) within each of these directories. These files are the default home pages for the domains. Create any other files or directories within these directories that you wish to appear in the virtual domains.

Step 7. Configure HomeDoor with the redirection information. Specifically, the HomeDoor address range should be 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.2, with 10.0.0.1 redirected to http://www2.companyX.com/companyX/ and 10.0.0.2 redirected to http://www2.companyY.com/companyY/. Remember that the www2's have been configured to be DNS aliases to your actual Web server.

Step 8. Write out the HomeDoor information. Be sure to restart the Macintosh if you have not done so since installing HomeDoor. The virtual domains www.companyX.com and www.companyY.com should now be active. Be sure to check them from a Macintosh other than the one on which HomeDoor is running.

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