I was wondering about the best practices regarding this? I know there are two ways to use IIS and host multiple websites.
The first is to have an IP for every website
The second is to use host headers, and a single IP Address for IIS
I was wondering which was the best practice, and why one should be preferred over the other?
Thanks!
It's easier to implement and manage SSL if each site has its own IP address/domain name. You simply get a cert for that name and install it on that site. Doing SSL with Host Headers requires a wildcard server certificate that is implemented and synchronized across all sites that share the IP. You also don't have the restriction that all the sites be in the same domain.
I personally separate sites based on the relation to each other. For example all of my business sites share a single IP adddress (1 domain currently). All of my personal/community sites share a second IP address.
The differences can come over time when it comes to sending e-mail as I know that IP comes into play in some blacklisting systems, so if one site with a shared IP address causes problems it CAN cause issues for the other sites using that IP.
I am sure there are other items, reasons, and justifications, but those are at least mine...
Personally I find host header configuration makes life very easy for standard web hosting.
I have literally hundreds of sites running of off single IP addresses on a number of servers - both IIS and *nix Apache, all configured as virtual hosts. In a live web hosting environment it makes life easier both in terms of DNS configuration and server configuration.
The only time I used IP based separation is where I want to run sites on different networks and thus serve the traffic of a different network interface.
I've not seen any performance loss with the host header methodology but would like to hear anyone's horror tales - there have to be some out there :-)
Virtual hosting is usually better than separate IP addresses, but your mileage will vary.
This is really a network vs. systems deployment connection. You want to look at the total number of sites and services you will have on a system. You might want them to live on separate network interfaces (hence multiple IP addresses). You might want them to live off bonded physical interfaces.
You might want web applications to run that need to run separately from others because of security reasons.
The other answers above mention other factors, like SSL, organizational boundaries. (Some software does make associations by IP-address, like spam control). There are probably many other factors I have not thought of.
Host headers are prefered because they conserve IPv4 address space. They have been mandatory since HTTP/1.1.
With https things are a little more complex; you need a modern browser that supports the TLS/SSL server_name extension (RFC 4366 and previously RFC 3546). This includes:
Opera 8.0 or later
Firefox 2.0 or later
IE 7 on Vista
Google Chrome
Of course your server has to support it. If you want to support earlier browsers and use SSL/TLS, you need to us an IP address per virtual host; as those browsers become obsolete you'll be about to share IP addresses for TLS/SSL.
Host Headers versus multiple IPs when hosting several websites
Related
I am curious on how to setup multiple load-balancers (with different IP addresses) with a specific domain.
I understand that it is possible to setup multiple A-records in a DNS to all of my load-balancers, but I can understand that this is not ideal.
DNS' doesn't do any kind of is-alive checks, so if a load-balancer dies, the DNS will still send users to this address, right?
So how do you connect a domain/DNS with multiple load-balancers, while preventing a dead load-balancer from getting requests...
I read something about anycast, but is this the only solution?
I am just curious about how this issue is normally handled.
Thanks.
You have multiple solutions.
On a pure DNS level you can publish your records with a low TTL (say 5 minutes), and have your monitoring systems change the content of the zone by removing the dead record when detected. This does not provide immediate fail-over but can be often good enough.
It does not involve too complicated systems.
Also, some DNS servers allow some "programmed part", with a dynamic backend that can compute records based on some external parameters, like doing live checks and replying only with the live records.
Anycast is another solution indeed, and has then no relationship with the DNS anymore (although the DNS itself can be "anycasted" but then it is to resolve its possible failover needs, not the ones of your application).
Basically your multiple systems, on various places in the world, are advertised with the same IP address. So the DNS has only one record.
With the "magic" of BGP, each instance announcing a given IP address will collect all the nearby traffic, so you get load-balancing for free in fact. And you need some specific tooling so that, as soon as some local instance is dead (or in maintenance mode for example), you stop announcing its IP address there, so that all other networks in the world, again because of BGP, learn that to reach "something" behing that IP they need to go somewhere else, to another instance of yours announcing this IP.
This is far more complicated to setup as you need a proven BGP setup (and making errors in BGP can have even greater consequences than in DNS), and multiple instances located in different datacentres, and possibly multiple AS numbers, depending on how you want to do your anycast done. This clearly needs skilled professional in BGP routing where the first solution with only DNS (in the first case of just changing a static zonefile) is reachable by any enthousiastic amateur.
So the answer also slightly depend on the network locations of your load-balancers.
Guys I really want to know how to hide my IP Address. And know why is it necessary to hide it?
I tried using anonymox, but I want to hide it without using any third party software.
You could try the methods listed here : https://pc4u.org/windows-10-how-to-connect-to-a-free-vpn-without-going-through-third-party-software/ if you don't want to use a third party software to hide your IP Address. You need to setup a VPN in your computer to achieve that. This will tunnel your network connection.
Source: pc4u.org
The only way to accomplish this without 3rd party software would be to use an online proxy and configure your browser to use said proxy. This will only change your IP as it appears to sites you visit through the browser and not other services you may be using on your computer.
The "best" way to "hide" or change your IP is to use a VPN (which you'll need software for). You can purchase a VPN service from one of Many providers. Some of the providers have their own apps that you can use, or, you can manually configure your own OpenVPN client. There are also many great scripts out there, AWS one-click servers, and cheap VPS providers that make it easier than ever to create your own VPN server. This might be over the "average" users head though...
The benefit of using a VPN is that it not only changes your IP, also encrypt your traffic.
It should be noted that VPN's are not 100% fool-proof. If not configured properly, you will expose your real IP. In addition, many VPN providers are not reputable.
The best recommendation I can make on this and every other topic on online privacy is this site here:
https://privacytools.io
This is (IMO) the best, most comprehensive source of information about protecting your privacy online. They will guide you in the right direction regarding VPN's, proxies, securing your browser, and much, much more. Check it out. Seriously...
OpenVPN has builds for all operating systems. https://openvpn.net
Like i said though, you'll have to purchase access (or if you're brave, find a free 'solution') from a provider and then configure OpenVPN to use your purchased credentials. This is usually about 5$ a month (for the solid / no logs / unlimited bandwidth ones ). There are many, many posts about setting up OpenVPN here on stackoverflow.
Finally, as far as the proxies go, again, you can purchase access to some of the reputable ones or search for a free one - though, in my experience the free proxies are very touch and go.
How are dynamic dns entries discovered by hackers and what tools are they using to glean this information?
A few days ago I signed up at no-ip.org for a free dns entry in order to open up my e-commerce site to a third party that needs to make calls to it in my development environment. Within a day I saw ip addresses coming to my site that are NOT from this third party. I’m wondering how this brand new dns entry was discovered and so quickly. At least one of these persons was attempting to hack the site and knew exactly the base product I was working with, an open source e-commerce system, and attempted to gain access to the admin area which has got me curious on how exactly these hackers are able to pull this information so quickly and know exactly the product I’m working with.
For now I’ve white-listed the ip addresses from this third party but I’d like to use the same logic these hackers are to look at my site from a security standpoint and better protect against it when we go to production.
To be alerted to new IPs listed in a nameserver requires privileged access to the zone files on the server, regardless of whether those IPs are entered through manual edits to the zone files or through an automated process like DDNS. A quick check shows that those rights aren't enabled by default through the standard mechanism at no-ip.
> server nf5.no-ip.com
Default Server: nf5.no-ip.com
Address: 83.222.240.75
> ls no-ip.com
[nf5.no-ip.com]
*** Can't list domain no-ip.com: Server failed
The DNS server refused to transfer the zone no-ip.com to your computer. If this
is incorrect, check the zone transfer security settings for no-ip.com on the DNS
server at IP address 83.222.240.75.
They do enable zone-transfers by-request, and I suppose that would be a nice thing for a hacker monitor. Fresh servers have the easiest vulnerabilities.
But honestly, it's just as likely that it was a random IP hit, as Marc suggested. To get your product info also isn't hard. After cataloging the server as a new device, it's typically easy to identify the service platform. Just establishing a TCP/IP connection to the server will typically reveal the operating system it runs through subtle tells in number sequences in IP packets and other tidbits of information. It can look deceptively like someone knew all about your server upon first connection.
We run a reverse proxy in front of our application tier and I'm wondering where the "best practice" place for handling the IP restriction is.
Currently, we use the application security to restrict access to specific resources by IP address but this has caused some issues when we moved to running behind a reverse proxy. It's quite easy to configure the allow/deny rules at the proxy instead of the application but since we run multiple applications behind the proxy, making modifications to the config there has the potential to affect other application (not a huge danger, but still present).
Is it better to do the filter further up the chain or closer to the application?
Are there any gotchas, like what we've encountered by doing application restriction and adding a reverse proxy where all the requests "come from" the proxy, forcing us to use a header to find the "real" IP address.
We filter as early as possible and keep it away from the application; these sort of things are better managed by network operations. The reason being is that app developers or maintainers are not always in on the loop when changing ip addresses and the network ops people are usually the first to know. Also network type tools are usually better at providing / restricting access that software level tools.
I would never restrict by IP address. Restrictions like that are the job of a security layer, not of the Network layer, which is where IP addresses live. I rarely find value in having an Application restrict the implementation of the Network.
This depends on the type of resources that need to be restricted by IP. If parts of the application need to be restricted via IP then the application should be handling it. If the entire application needs to be blocked then you should be further up the chain.
The general rule is to restrict as early as possible without compromising any audit systems you have in place (it is almost always a good idea to know when people try to break your security system).
I restrict by IP addresses as early as possible - this eliminates unnecessary traffic in the following layers or subnetworks. So my advice is similar to u07ch's do it as early as possible.
I want to check a particular website from various locations. For example, I see a site example.com from the US and it works fine. The colleague in Europe says he cannot see the site (gets a dns eror).
Is there any way I can check that for my self instead of asking him every time?
This is a bit of self promotion, but I built a tool to do just this that you might find useful, called GeoPeeker.
It remotely accesses a site from servers spread around the world, renders the page with webkit and sends back an image. It will also report the IP address and DNS information of the site as it appears from that location.
There are no ads, and it's very stream-lined to serve this one purpose. It's still in development, and feedback is welcome. Here's hoping somebody besides myself finds it useful!
Sometimes a website doesn't work on my PC and I want to know if it's the website or a problem local to me(e.g. my ISP, my router, etc).
The simplest way to check a website and avoid using your local network resources(and thus avoid any problems caused by them) is using a web proxy such as Proxy.org.
Well, DNS should be the same worldwide, wouldn't it? Of course it can take up to a day or so until your new DNS record is propagated around the world. So either something is wrong on your colleague's end or the DNS record still takes some time...
I usually use online DNS lookup tools for that, e.g. http://network-tools.com/
It can check your HTTP header as well. Only a proxy located in Europe would be better.
Besides using multiple proxies or proxy-networks, you might want to try the planet-lab. (And probably there are other similar institutions around).
The social solution would be to post a question on some board that you are searching for volunteers that proxy your requests. (They only have to allow for one destination in their proxy config thus the danger of becoming spam-whores is relatively low.) You should prepare credentials that ensure your partners of the authenticity of the claim that the destination is indeed your computer.
DNS info is cached at many places. If you have a server in Europe you may want to try to proxy through it
It depends on wether the locatoin is detected by different DNS resolution from different locations, or by IP address that you are browsing from.
If its by DNS, you could just modify your hosts file to point at the server used in europe. Get your friend to ping the address, to see if its different from the one yours resolves to.
To browse from a different IP address:
You can rent a VPS server. You can use putty / SSH to act as a proxy. I use this from time to time to brows from the US using a VPS server I rent in the US.
Having an account on a remote host may or may not be enough. Sadly, my dreamhost account, even though I have ssh access, does not allow proxying.
The only thing that springs to mind for this is to use a proxy server based in Europe. Either have your colleague set one up [if possible] or find a free proxy. A quick Google search came up with http://www.anonymousinet.com/ as the top result.