Exchange '07 External & Internal Name Resolution

[Zach]

TSCustomer:

In the training video "Exchange Server 2007":

Pre-Install Preparation
-DNS Setup
-Setting up the name resolution environment
-External and internal name resolution - com vs local

Our external & internal address needs to be the same “lasallle.edu". How do we set this up? Thanks!

[DShack]

Your question could mean a couple of different things:

1) We use our external domain name on our internal domain: how does that change the way we set up Exchange 2007?

2) We have a public name (lasalle.edu) and an internal domain name (lu.internal), but we'd like people to use the same URL regardless of whether they are inside our outside of our network. How do we do that?

Depending on which of these questions you intend to ask, the answer is different. I'm assuming that you need to do #2.

In that case, you'd need to have implemented a "split-DNS" in which your internal DNS server has a different set of records for lasalle.edu than your public DNS servers. Let's say that your outside users connect to webmail.lasalle.edu, and you want your internal users to do that too. You'd add a "webmail" record to your internal lasalle.edu DNS database and the record would point to the internal IP of your mail server, not the external IP. Then when you are configuring your OWA and other CAS components, any time you see fields for "external URL" and "internal URL" you would use the same URL for both, knowing that users could access that URL either on the inside or the outside. Outside users would get the external IP from the public DNS and internal users would get the internal IP of your mail server from the internal DNS. The certificate name would be the same for both purposes.

Let me know if you need any clarification on that.

Dave Shackelford