Help setting up private domain forwarding to ip : port

Hello DS! I have found tons of helpful information on these forums, so I am happy to finally have bothered to join up!

Here is the situation: I have no experience with DNS and I am very much out of my element trying to accomplish this task. I need to configure our local DNS server (windows 2003) to associate certain ip : ports to a domain.

Basically we have multiple internal websites, hosted on one w2k3 box running apache webserver, and I need to resolve multiple domains to each of the virtual hosts that I have configured in apache.

http://intranet1/ >> myapacheserver:1111
http://intranet2/ >> myapacheserver:2222

I have apache configured to run virtual hosts, and it has been tested and works fine... if i type in the ip : port or the machinename : port I can access my sites just fine. I have gotten as far as associating ONE of these domains with the machinename/ip of my webserver, but it resolves to the default web share. This would mean I would need one PC/IP address per domain, which is not going to work out!

Poking around in the DNS forward lookup settings on our domain controller server, I have found a way to associate a machine name, or IP to a domain, but no way to specify ports.

I found a post by SilentRage indicating that this is not possible with DNS alone ,and I need to setup 'Domain Forwarding' as well to get the desired result.

I guess I just need some coaching as to what the next step is. How do I create a dummy server that CAN forward a domain request to the appropriate port? Can all this be done on one machine (webserver) or will I need 2 servers + the domain controller?

Sorry if I am overlooking the obvious, I am primarily the web content publisher, and have not had the opportunity to get my hands dirty with server configuration yet.

Any help or guidance would be appreciated!

-Chris

I managed to figure this out using IIS 6.0 (ugh...)

Turns out you don't need to forward to any port other than 80. I used the advanced option to specify the host value to direct the user to the proper web site. It works beatifully as far as I have been able to test.

I guess this wasn't a DNS issue, all I could do is point both domains to the same IP, and let IIS figure out the rest.

Now I want to try to figure this out using apache though!

kudos to you on finding the answer. Yes, on IIS it is multiple websites on a single server via "Host Headers". For apache, the terminology is "VirtualHosts". Feel free to pick the brains lurking about the apache forum.

I did end up figuring out the apache way of solving this problem as well. my problem is that I was so hung up on forwarding to a certain port (because that is how my dev box is setup). turns out it was all too easy to get it right, just cleared out my virtual hosts and started over, trying to emulate what I had setup with IIS, and it worked like a charm!

one of these days I will have it all figured out! for the time being I have to sludge my way through any server configurations the slow way!

Thanks bobafett! You pointed me in the right direction. One important thing to note: Make sure your DNS server has a "HOST" entry that matches the host name you provide to IIS and it's pointing to the IIS IP address.