Microsoft's Definition of "Local Intranet"

[thepeopleseason]

So, in case you're wondering, if you want to create a network of web servers, administered so that you can just have a single sign-on and NTLM will pass your authentication credentials between the servers, you need to make sure that all of these machines appear to your browser as members of the "Local Intranet."

Now, if you go into Internet Explorer, there is a provision to add sites to the "Local Intranet," but it doesn't appear to work correctly--we had to sign on to both websites.

We took a look to see if the machines we were hooking up were registered as valid servers/workstations under the same NT Domain. No deal.

We finally took a look at the Microsoft Knowledge Base page on local intranets. Apparently host1.domain.com is not in the same local intranet as host-x.domain.com. Neither is host2.domain.com.

host1 and host2, however are. Can you see the difference?

A machine is defined as being in the local intranet of host-x.domain.com if host-x can reach the machine via an address without dots.

I am now dumber for knowing that.

Comments

[skander.livejournal.com]

You have got to be kidding me.

[thepeopleseason.livejournal.com]

From Microsoft Technet:
Local intranet zone: This zone typically contains any addresses that don't require a proxy server, as defined by the system administrator. These include sites specified on the Connections tab, network paths (such as \\computername\foldername), and local intranet sites (typically addresses that don't contain periods, such as http://internal). You can add sites to this zone. The default security level for the Local intranet zone is Medium, therefore, Internet Explorer will allow all cookies from Web sites in this zone to be saved on your computer and read by the Web site that created them.