"Studying for MCSE certification? There are just some things you can't learn
without setting up your own Web and mail servers. Tom Shinder shows you how to
pull this off without a static IP address."
When I talk to people
studying for the Windows 2000 exams, I find the area where folks have the
most trouble is understanding how to use Windows 2000 in an
Internet-connected environment. This problem makes it difficult for them to
discover how several of the features included in Windows 2000 work in
real life. They can't see how the technologies work in real life, and
therefore lack the insight that real experience would give them.
What
these people all have in common is that they use dial-up connections to
access the Internet. The problem is that when you use dial-up connections,
the machine receives a different IP address each time. Because the servers
get a different IP address, it makes it difficult to practice setting up web
servers, VPN servers and proxy/firewall servers.
One way to solve
this problem is to use a Dynamic DNS Service like TZO or Dynip. I have been
using TZO myself for several years to run my own mail and web servers. Even
when I had a dial-up ISDN connection that received a dynamic IP address,
users and email servers could always access my sites because the
connection was dynamically registered with a Dynamic DNS
server.
What is Dynamic DNS?
A Public Dynamic DNS
(DDNS) service allows you to use a dial-up connection with a dynamically
assigned address and have your address automatically registered with a
Dynamic DNS server. Once your IP address is registered with the Dynamic
DNS server, users on the Internet can access your server using a Fully
Qualified Domain Name that stays the same instead of an IP address that is
always changing.
For example, I have registered the name isa.tzo.com with
TZO. I used this domain name for testing ISA Server, Mail Server and web
servers. After I install the TZO client software I dial up my modem. The RAS
client negotiates with the RAS server and obtains an IP address for the
connection. After my machine obtains an IP address, the TZO client software
reports its IP address to the TZO Dynamic DNS server.
After
registering my current IP address, any user on the Internet can access my
machine by using the FQDN isa.tzo.com. Another nice thing about TZO and
other Dynamic DNS services is that it creates a wildcard DNS entry for your
domain. Therefore, I can use FQDNs such as mail.isa.tzo.com,
ftp.isa.tzo.com, www.isa.tzo.com and exchange.isa.tzo.com. You can use
virtually any host name and append it to your domain
name.
Using Dynamic DNS with IIS
A Dynamic DNS service
is a great help when learning to configure IIS. Since IIS 5.0 is part of the
Windows 2000 MCSE track, you need to have more than a passing acquaintance
with this server product. IIS is also the Windows 2000 web platform, so
if you do not understand how IIS works you will be at a major disadvantage
when learning the .Net collection of server products.
When you start
learning about IIS and how to configure a Web server, FTP server, NNTP
server and SMTP server, you should put a modem on the machine. Then
configure a connectoid for your ISP and install the DDNS client software.
Then dial up the ISP. After the connection is complete, test to see if
your server is resolving to your FQDN.
To test that your machine has
successfully registered its IP address with the DDNS server, you should use
the nslookup command. Open a command prompt and
type:
nslookup
This will take you to interactive nslookup command
prompt, which looks like this:
>
Once you get the command
prompt, type in the 'true' FQDN for your domain. For
example:
>www.isa.tzo.com. (remember, a true FQDN ends with a
".")
and then press ENTER. After you press enter, you should see
something like:
After confirming the registration, create a
web site or use the default web site. Open the browser and type in the FQDN
for your IIS server. You will be able to access the web site using the
FQDN, and so will everyone else. The next time you dial up, people will
still be able to access the site via the same FQDN, even though your IP
address...
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