This post is probably 'old hat' to some, but I thought I'd add it here in case it might help someone. It relates to demonstrating SharePoint Server 2007 web applications remotely using a single IP address and URLs excluding the port numbers.
Scenario
- You have a customer demonstration in a few hours and you only have one IP address bound to your test server.
- You need to demo several Web applications and want to use names (URLs) for each web application synonymous with the customer's existing sites, for instance, rather than http://server_name:portnumber you prefer to demo using something like http://companyx.
- You will run the demo from a remote laptop.
Easy! You just need to add each Web application alias to the HOST file on the remote laptop.
How?
SharePoint actually adds those entries to the host file on the SharePoint Web front-end server so that the correct URL will be returned in search results, for example:
192.168.0.40 companyx #Added by Office SharePoint Server Search (11/27/2006 10:52 AM).
192.168.0.40 companyy #Added by Office SharePoint Server Search (11/27/2006 10:52 AM).
To add the entries to your remote laptop to enable you to successfully browse to each Web application, do the following:-
- Using Windows Explorer, browse to %SystemDrive%\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and open the hosts file using Notepad. Make the entries at the bottom of the hosts file, for example:-
192.168.0.40 companyx
192.168.0.40 companyy
192.168.0.40 companyz
Note, the above is based on the remote laptop being in the same domain as the SharePoint Web front-end server.