Member Avatar for gotchagood24

This may be more of a web design or networking question, but since it does involve windows explorer and IE, I figured I would drop it here. What I need to do is have my local clients set up so that when a user types www in their address bar and hit enter the default site that will be reached is the local web address. They can all access the page by typing in the IP, but I want it to be easier for some of my users. I've seen it done on larger scale networks, but I don't know how to set it up. Any help would be appreciated!

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Colonel Panic

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— ’s desktop-shortcut trick works for a few machines but is fragile. is right: make the name resolve centrally. Two practical, maintainable options follow, plus a few gotchas.

DNS (recommended)
Create an internal A record so the name resolves for everyone. In Windows DNS Manager: open your Forward Lookup Zone -> New Host (A) -> Name: www -> IP: your web server IP -> Create Host. Or with PowerShell (Server role installed):

Add-DnsServerResourceRecordA -ZoneName "example.local" -Name "www" -IPv4Address "192.168.1.10"

Ensure clients receive the correct DNS domain/suffix from DHCP (option 015 or option 119) so single-label lookups like www are tried against your internal zone.

Central hosts deployment (if no DNS)
Deploy a managed hosts file via Group Policy Preferences instead of editing machines one-by-one. GPO path: Computer Configuration -> Preferences -> Windows Settings -> Files -> New (Replace). Source: a network share with the hosts file; Destination: %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. Example hosts entry:

192.168.1.10 www

Troubleshooting and cautions
Test name resolution from the command line with nslookup www and ping www. Clear caches with ipconfig /flushdns. Verify the web server’s bindings/host headers in IIS so it will accept requests for that name. Note: some browsers treat single-label input as a search term (not a hostname); confirming DNS resolution via nslookup helps separate browser behavior from DNS issues.

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Member Avatar for MartyMcFly

Create a new shortcut on the desktop, (default user profile desktop for many users) to your site, and call it www. For ease, make this a hidden file.

Then open the browser and type www and the page will by magic appear.

EDIT They could just use the desktop shortcut if you leave it unhidden, but eh... doesn't look as pro

Member Avatar for Colonel Panic

The problem with that is that it involves doing it on all the computers, and it can be undone. If you have control of the local DNS server then you can create a DNS (A) record that points to the server.

If you don't have a DNS server, then you are better off editing the local hosts file on each of the computers. It's a little file in the %windir%\system32 folder that you can modify in notepad (Note: Its just called hosts, it has no extension). You can add the name "www" and the IP address to this file (it already has an example in it so you can see how to format it) and it will translate the name "www" when they enter it in their browser. In fact, you can edit the file on one machine, copy it to a network share, then simply copy the file to the other machines and replace the local ones with the one in the share.

commented: You learn something new every day, MMF +1
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