XAMPP Vhosts on Windows 2003 can be accessed from the web, but not on internal network

Question

We have 10 sites hosted on our Windows based Apache server. The server is also a domain controller, DNS and DHCP server. All websites work great externally but but internally we can only access one or two of them.

What could be causing the problem?

Answer 1

First of all, you should really split out the server roles. Your DCs shouldn't be exposed to the Internet ever and there are security implications to running DHCP on a DC as well.

That said, I'd imagine the problem is DNS. Are you using the DC for internal name resolution and another server as authoritative for outside visitors? If your AD domain name is the same as your external domain name, you'll need to have a copy of all A records in both places. This is why it's always good to separate your internal resources from your external ones and never use overlapping domain names. It leads to a split-brain DNS situation like this.

I know that I've made a few assumptions about your configuration, but you didn't really provide many relevant details. If this isn't the case, please revise your question and leave a comment on this answer so that I will be notified.