HOWTO: Configuring an internal Membersite

The goal of this write-up is to explain the steps necessary to configure a Membersite for use on your local machine, as I often have to do for dev purposes, or on some form of non-public intranet, as many corporations are interested in.

The entire process relies on a slight bit of DNS trickery, and if you want to have a pretty logo you will need at least one public domain.

Before you start this, you will need: * a sxip identity, this can be acquired by registering at a Homesite, e.g. demohomesite.com. * access to your 'hosts' file, or the DNS server your intranet uses.

The nature of SXIP pushes all data through the users browser in a series of POSTs, we will take advantage of this to force the user's browser to visit a local address by inserting the proper results for SXIP-related DNS queries.

Step 0: Optional A custom logo

• If you want a custom logo, set up a DNS subdomain on a public domain that you own, e.g. local.an9.org -- it can just forward to your public domain, e.g. an9.org -- and place a 234w x 60h logo image (gif, jpg, or png) somewhere publicly available on that domain, e.g. http://local.an9.org/images/an9.org.logo.png, and remember the url for the end of Step 1.2.

Step 1: Register your Membersite

• 1.1: To register your Membersite, go to https://admin.sxip.net and sxip in. Once you have sxipped in, you will be presented with two options, "Administer your Membersites" and "Administer your Homesites," you want to choose "Administer your Membersites."
• 1.2: From here you will click the button that says "Register a new Membersite," which will, after an access agreement, bring you to a page with a few fields to fill in.
  • Enter your FQDN or domain name: This is where you put the domain name that you will be using, it doesn't need to exist but it is good practice to choose a sub-domain of a domain that you own to ensure that there is no reason to need to change it later. For our examples we will assume you entered local.an9.org.
  • Enter the hostname of the server you wish to handle Sxip requests: Some advanced users may have a good reason for using something different from the first field here, but you don't, so just put local.an9.org in here, too.
  • Enter the URL of your site logo: If you did Step 0 above, put in that url here, http://local.an9.org/images/an9.org.logo.png, if you did not, leave this empty and a logo will be generated for you.
• 1.3: Once you hit Continue you will be asked to verify what you have entered, once you have you are done registering your Membersite.

Step 2: Tweaking your DNS

• 2.1: If you are running your Membersite locally open up /etc/hosts (in WinXP it is C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) in your favorite editor. If you are doing this for an intranet, you'll need to apply these changes to your intranet's DNS server instead.
• 2.2a: Find the line regarding localhost, you'll need to add two entries to this line, 'local.an9.org' and 'local.an9.org.membersite.sxip.net' without the quotes.
• 2.2b: For an intranet you will need to make entries for those addresses in the intranet DNS point to the local IP of the machine running the membersite, e.g. 192.168.1.15. This tricks your computer into looking at an internal IP when it accesses those domains, which means the domains don't have to be publicly available.

There you have it. Anybody with questions, please leave a comment and I'll do what I can to refine/update this entry. For quick reference, it is available at http://an9.org/devdev/howto/internal_membersite.