Redirects working inconsistenly in IIS 6/W2K3

Hi there-

I'm having an interesting problem with redirecting sites in IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003. We've got two different scenarios that we're using right now:

(All IPs/sites mentioned are externally accessible/Internet addresses)

1) A redirector "site" that has several addresses tied to one ip - all addresses go to the same site. If the real site is www.123.com with an ip of 1.2.3.4, we would have 1234.com, www123.com, and so on all on one redirector site with an ip of 1.2.3.5 that IIS points to 123.com.

2) A site with a unique ip that's set to redirect one-to-one. So if the actual site is hello.123.com with an ip of 2.3.4.5, we have hello.1234.com with an ip of 2.3.4.6 set up as a real site in IIS and pointing to hello.123.com

The odd part:
On our internal network, NONE of the redirects work on MS boxes, but they do work on an internal Mac with the exception of the one-to-one (hello.1234.com), which I'd have thought had the best chance of working.

From home and from several other places, everything works.

From still other places, everything *except* hello.1234.com works. I'm thinking to put that one in with the shared addresses so that it has at least a shot of working *most* places.

At first blush I assumed that it was just that our internal system was set to disallow any and all redirects, but redirects that don't belong to us seem to work ok. What I'm trying to figure out is:
- What's causing this stuff to work some places and not others?
- Is it an IIS issue, a security/policy issue, or both?
- Is there anything I can do to ensure server-level (not a script/page) redirects *always* work? (I'm betting "no," but I gotta try)
- What's up with the one-to-one redirect failing in some environments where the pooled ones work?

I'm going cross-eyed looking at this, so I'd really appreciate a fresh perspective. I'm stymied, even though I think it's something simple. Any help would be HUGELY appreciated.

Thanks!
Ed

What do you mean by redirects? Host Headers? Some kind of scripting redirection?

Host headers need http 1.1 compliant browsers afaik.

I mean a regular old IIS redirect as you're able to set them in the Properties menu of a site.

The issue isn't really "solved" per se, but I've gotten it to a point where I'm updating for the sake of documentation - hopefully folks will find this useful in some way.

I moved the site that had a unique address set up for it to a pooled (host headers under the same ip) redirect, and it works in more places now, but we still never figured out why a simple redirect like that would work some places and not others, or why the pooled one works more reliably.

As for redirects being completely inaccessible, this turns out to be, at least in our environment, unique to IE on XP SP2 (surprise!) and the associated policy it's assigned. So that's pretty much the end of it. At this point we figure we've got the number of people who won't be able to redirect down to a fraction of a fraction, so we're content to let it be - just wanted to mention it in case anyone else experiences similar troubles.