Sharing a Site with DNS Pointing Elsewhere
Posted December 29th, 2012 @ 11:26am by Erik J. Barzeski
I'm working on a site for a tech-unsavvy friend, and I'd like to let him look at the site. Normally (as I do on my machines) I'd have the guy set the non-www. domain name in his hosts file to point to the new IP address, but he's unable to do that.
So what are my options? Again the domain.com is currently pointing elsewhere for everyone, but I have some spare domains I can use. I'm surely brain farting on how to use them, because I've set one up as an alias and that's not worked, and on the server side I've tried symlinking the public_html folder on one domain to the other.
Again, I'm surely brain farting, but why? What's the easiest way to point someone to a site that's pointed by all DNS elsewhere without actually moving the files and database to a new domain (which may break some of the links, particularly in a WordPress powered site)?
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Posted 15 Jan 2013 at 9:39am #
You could configure a new DNS server to respond for that domain, configured with that address, then have him configure his PC to use that DNS server.
A secondary domain probably won't work, because the web server is most likely configured to respond to the name, not the IP address.
If you aren't familiar with doing that, send me the FQDN and the IP address you want, and I'll try to configure a DNS server for you, for the friend to use.
Posted 15 Jan 2013 at 9:52am #
Thanks. He finally figured out how to edit his hosts file. 🙂
Posted 15 Jan 2013 at 9:53am #
Good. I didn't want to have to reboot my Airport Extreme just to enable DNS. 😉