Alternate Access Mappings for SharePoint 2007
This is particularly relevant to those of you hosting a SharePoint site behind a firewall and the URL that the public uses to access the site is different than the URL (or FQDM) that is used to connect on the intranet.
This is new to 2007 and I know many of you, like myself, would probably do the standard configuration....forward port 80 (in my case, TW blocks port 80 so I use 82) on your firewall to the IP address of the server running SharePoint. Should work right? Nope.
There is a new feature in WSS and MOSS 2007 that allows you to add an alternate access mapping (reminded me of the similar functionality in Citrix nFuse where you had to specify when you used multiple URL's to connect to the nFuse website...) if you are using a unique URL to access the site on the extranet.
In my case, I setup MOSS 2007 on a server on my home network. I use the dyndns.org service to monitor my public IP and then open ports to map specific applications through my firewall - web, Exchange, FTP, etc... When I'm connected to the intranet, I just use the hostname of the server (in my case it's simply named 'HOME') to connect. On the internet however, I use my hostname.dyndns.org:82 to connect.
When I first set all this up - connecting internally worked great. Connecting externally would only get me as far as prompting for authentication. Once I entered the credentials required to access the site, IE would indicate a connection error.
After digging around I found the following in the OPERATIONS area in the SharePoint Central Administration Tool. All you need to do is EDIT PUBLIC URL'S and then enter the FQDM's (including non-standard ports, if you are using them).
In default and intranet fields I used the hostname:82 and in the internet and extranet used the FQDM used to access via the internet (with non-standard port information). You also want to make sure that you click the "Alternate Access Mapping Collection" dropdown and select the appropriate site to map to.
