KACE Product Support

Hello all,

We're in a bit of a pickle here and I would greatly appreciate some assistance trying to get this worked out. Here's a little background information:

We purchased the Dell K1000 appliance a few years ago. It was only intended for internal use at that time. However, now we are finding that we need it for both internal and external, as our company has a lot of remote offices that we need to be able to access to patch their computers. Our K1000 connects to the bigger remote offices via Sonicwall VPN, but for the smaller offices that cannot afford a Sonicwall, we are looking at setting up our K1000 for internet accessibility, so those remote offices can have their computer patching covered.

Now, let me explain something. Here at our headquarters, we are on a domain; let's call it abc.com. When we first set up our K1000, we used the hostname of kbox and the web server name as kbox.abc.com (automatically generated due to our domain).

I've watched the "Managing External Machines" KKE video from Dell's website and learned that once you go through the steps to get it on the internet (SSL activation/putting the K1000 in a DMZ or port forwarding through the firewall), then external client machines can install the KACE Agent and use the web server name of the K1000 during the installation to point their agent at the K1000 for patching. So basically, the same setup as installing the agent on an internal machine. However, here is where the problem truly lies.

Our internal machines can recognize kbox.abc.com because it's our internal domain. Sonicwall VPN offices can recognize it, again, because it's internal. However, external machines cannot resolve kbox.abc.com or even just abc.com, because we don't own that domain externally. If we try to go to abc.com in a web browser, it just redirects us to another company which owns the abc.com domain.

Because of this, I believe we need to change our K1000 web server name to something different. We have other web servers that we host here at our headquarters. For example, a SharePoint server that can be accessed anywhere by going to https://theabc.com:449. We also have another web server for our employees to do electronic timesheets, which can be accessed by going to https://theabc.com:447. We have a Citrix web server which can be accessed by going to https://theabc.com:444. All of these web servers have something in common: they use theabc.com (a domain that we do own) and a port number that we've designated via our Sonicwall firewall rules. So, naturally, we thought, "let's change the web server name on the K1000 to kbox.theabc.com".

We did this and the K1000 rebooted itself. Once it came back up, we still had to use the old URL to access it internally (kbox.abc.com) instead of the new one. On the K1000 console itself, it said to access the admin website, we needed to use kbox.theabc.com, but when we tried going to that page, it would just time out over and over. It's like the change never even happened, since we still had to use the old web server name to access the site.

So, the next guess was changing the domain name on the K1000. We changed it from abc.com to theabc.com, even though our internal domain is still abc.com (it would be a HUGE pain to have to change the entire domain because of all the stuff we have set up to use abc.com). We weren't sure if this would work, though, because the domain is really supposed to be abc.com and not theabc.com.

The K1000 rebooted again, and we still could only access the management page with the old link (kbox.abc.com) and not the new link (kbox.theabc.com). The agents we had on our machines were still checking in correctly, but the patch deployment was failing, so eventually we changed everything back to the way it was before. That means web server name went back to kbox.abc.com and the domain name went back to abc.com. This is where we are stuck.

Sorry for the long story, but I wanted to give all the information leading up to this event. I've done some reading on changing the web server name and domain name to see what affects it would have on our K1000 and its agents, but I haven't been able to find a scenario that resembles ours. Usually it's people wanting to change just the web server name and not the domain, or they want to change both and they just want to change the domain to a domain that they already have configured on a different network.

In summary:
We have a K1000 (version 6.3.113399) sitting on a .com domain that we do not own externally.
Because of this, external computers cannot resolve our K1000 web server name.
We want to change our K1000 web server name to a name that we DO own.
When we changed the K1000 web server name to match the domain we own, it would not let us resolve the new name internally, it was still resolving to the old web server name.

Our goal:
Make the K1000 accessible outside of the network without having to completely convert our domain at our headquarters, as it would be chaos setting everything back up under a new domain.

Ultimately, the question is: Is this possible to do?

Additional thoughts: I feel as though there might be an easy fix to this, mostly by utilizing DNS/Sonicwall NAT policies/other network tools and redirection, but I am at a complete loss on how to accomplish this and would probably need a step-by-step to understand how this would work. It may not be as easy as that, though.