DNS Aliasing question

[Stuart_C]

Soon we are having SIMS SLG installed with capita hosting. When we get the URL for the site it's in some massively user unfriendly format such as http://hslgxx.capita-cso.co.uk/schools/xxxx/SLG

As this is not that catchy I was wondering about setting up a alias in my own DNS that was a bit easier such as http://slg.schooldomain and then pointing it to the site name I was given.

 

Now this is where my DNS/website knowledge gets a little vague. Can I actually do that? I don't what to point at the IP address in case Capita ever muck around whith the IP address. Secondly if I'm resolving to the domain name will I need to get capita to enable the website to support requests to slg.schooldomain? I think yes but I'm not sure.

 

Any help and advice would be appreciated.

 

Sorry forgot to mention I'm wanting to do this in our "external" DNS not the one hosted by my servers on site.

Edited May 13, 2010 by Stuart_C

[pete]

You could set up a redirect via your proxy.

 

(I just slung a link to SLG on the default homepage)

[Stuart_C]

Good call but that won't work from outside school. Which is wew people are most likely to go "what was the site again?"

I also want to avoid having to sent the hard of thinking to 1 site to get a link to go to another.

I can put links to it all over the place internally. It's for those at home I'm thinking of.

[glennda]

Do you have control over the external DNS settings for your school domain? I would presume your hosting company has the DNS settings on there servers. In which case you would need to get them to add a sub-domain for you and direct it to the IP address that the capita address points to.

 

Toby

[pete]

Big Obvious Link on website (from September 2010, the majority of your SLG users will be parents who may just remember the school url.)

On your public-facing webserver use a redirect in the http://www.schooldomain.tld/slg subfolder?

Or redirect slg.schooldomain.tld

[powdarrmonkey]

Now this is where my DNS/website knowledge gets a little vague. Can I actually do that?

 

No. DNS can only work on hostnames; it's just a mechanism for turning them into IP addresses. You can't use it to redirect things at a high level, like web addresses. (besides this, when the browser sends your aliased hostname to Capita's server, it'll disclaim all knowledge about it in any case.)

 

Secondly if I'm resolving to the domain name will I need to get capita to enable the website to support requests to slg.schooldomain? I think yes but I'm not sure.

 

Any help and advice would be appreciated.

 

How about an url-shortening service with a custom alias?