Acces Confluence via browser without typing the IP

[Dr. Brigitte Kirch]

Hey guys,

I got the job to migrate our confluence setup to windows server 2012 R2. So far I got everything running beside the access:

I can get into the Wiki by typing this URL: 'wiki.kestner.lan:81'. So I've set up an ALIAS in the DNS manager, pointing toward the correct server.

Now I would like to get there without pointing at the IP. I've tried using Tomcat and the IIS-Manager, but that just points me toward the directory, not the actual wiki. (https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-setup-confluence-with-iis-188233.html) Also multiple redirect/forwarding plugins for IIS failed to succeed.

I know it is possible because on the old setup, you can type 'www.kestner.lan', which gets translated into 'http://www.kestner.lan/confluence/pages/ ...', unfortunately, there is no one left who might know how the old setup works and I don't even know where to start looking.

Letting confluence listen on port '80' does not work either since there are some Windows services using the port I really don't want to touch.

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Regards, Ian

(Uwe Meyer was the guy original working on Confluence)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The usual way to do this is by using a "reverse proxy" instead of a direct connection.  A proxy listens on port 80 and 443 on a server, so that when your DNS directs a browser to the proxy server, it can go fetch data from the actual server - often providing several services under on a single url.  For example, http://myconfluence:8090/conf and http://myjira:8080/jira both appear under https://nic/jira and https://nic/conf in my house...

The page you link to is an instruction on setting up IIS as a proxy, but if it's serving up the directory rather than the application, then it's not quite set up correctly - that's usually a problem with the isapi.dll setup in my experience, but it has been a while since I used IIS.

I'd try to work out what is serving up http://ww.kestner.lan to begin with