The things you think you know
Now I like to think of myself as a Domino expert of sorts. Ask me anything (within reason) and I think I could tell you the answer. However, since Domino 6 has been released this is no longer so true. Until last week I thought I knew something about Domino. I thought that changing things like default number of rows for a view was possible but that any change you made would effect the whole server and all databases on it. The same is still true, to an extent, but we can get round it using the new Internet Site documents.
Internet Site document are best suited to people like Prominic who have many websites on one box. The box could have one IP address but with different web addresses pointing to it. With Internet Sites you can configure the Domino HTTP server for each site.
What does this mean for us and our intranet environments? Well, if you're friendly with your admin guys you can probably get new addresses added to the company DNS servers. Your Domino 6 server may have only one IP address but your admin buddies can point more than one address at it. Let's say your server is called domino and has a fixed IP address. You host two main sites on it - one for the HR department and one for the Sales team. You get the DNS team to register hr.domino.company.com and sales.domino.company.com to point to the same server. You then set up an Internet Sites document for each one. The HR document can have a "Homepage" setting of /hr/home.nsf and Sales' can be /sales/home.nsf, or whatever. Then HR can use session-based authentication with their customised login screen and Sales can carry on using the dialog box. Sales can show 1000 rows in their view while HR keep it at 30.
You get the idea right? Not sure I put it across that well. Tomorrow I will try and expand a little...
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You can subscribe to an individual
Yes,
I am already running this sort of setup for our clients web portals...
You should be able to do sing-in and error form mappings for any of these sites...
I'm having probs with https in combination with internet sites :(
Sing-ing joe. Can't remember the last time my server sang ;o)
Vince. What's the problem?
I couldn't get Internet Sites to work until I read this:
{Link}
I don't know if any of you have implemented hosted organizations but when I attempted it it was a total nightmare with regards to mail. Never received any response to my main issue regarding smtp authentication. Don't know if any of you have any experience with this, I ended up reverting back to a standard domino setup. I figured I would throw this out there since it is related to the discussion of having mult websites on one domino server:
{Link}
Jake - I have never heard my server singing - missed the typo :-)
Alastair, Vince - you cannot access the server via https when using virtual hosts with the same IP. You have to enable http for those servers and request https for corresponding databases only.
The reason? If the communication is encrypted via SSL how can the server tell which virtual host are requesting?
(More on LDD, look for Jeff Callow's New web technologies in Domino 6).
That makes sense, but don't solve the problem itself. In this case the server is unreachable via http (blocked).
Well,
if http HAS to be blocked - then there is no other solution than addding secondary IPs if that is possible....
Vince,
I got HTTPS to work with internet site documents (using the self cert method). I did have a big problem with windows xp and file permissions regarding the actual key file but solved it in the end. Can you get HTTPS to work with one site ?
If you want, drop me a line and I will go over what I did.
Jake,
It is a pitty that you give up on this subject. I don't use notesmail and don't use https but, so don't experience any of the problems above. Setting internet site documents is a bit of a pain, but when you get it running it works fine.
The big advantage is the short urls without the databasepath/databasename.nsf in it. This is handy because:
- it looks more professional to your visitors
- the urls are easier to mail without breaking over two lines
- the generated html pages are lighter, because the urls in it are shorter
- easier to design and maintain, webdatabases without ANY @webdbname fields, just using the html baseref technique described here on your site
For readers that would like to profit from these advantages, and being in an environment without the potential disadvantages I could recommend the following Notes 6 forum entry:
{Link}
If you want to see it in action, please check {Link} and check the baseref in the header and the generated urls.