DNS root domain and hosted websites

Question

I have an internal domain let say example.com and my office365 and other services use but I have a hosted website that the developers want the example.com to resolve not just www.example.com. Does anyone know a tool to make this happen?

Answer 1

Based on the wording, I am assuming you mean an internal Active Directory domain. If this is the case, then this is why best practice is not to use example.com as your internal domain name, but something such as int.example.com, internal.example.com, corp.example.com, etc. The issue here is that Active Directory heavily depends on DNS to function, and as soon as you point example.com to an external website (that does not also function as a webserver), then you break Active Directory's functionality on the network.

If this is only for the developers for testing, you may wish to either set up a test machine with C:\windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts configured to point example.com to your external IP, set up a test machine using external DNS instead of the internal Active Directory DNS, or grant your developers the ability to change their local C:\windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts files at will (typically would require local administrative access which is typically a security no-no). Depending on what the developers need to test, you could also potentially configure your domain controllers with IIS to proxy requests to the external website, but this is definitely not recommended for various reasins, primarily security. Note: if you do add an entry to the C:\windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file on an Active Directory joined PC, the PC will not properly function on the domain during this time, and may have other unintended consequences.

Depending on the size and complexity of the network (ie if the network is small/simple enough, and your O365 is not AD-sync'd), you may want to consider a Active Directory domain rename to something that better follows best practice and would allow a cleaner solution to your problem without a nasty work-around.