Passing webservice request through DMZ on IIS6/7

Question

My clients are making webservice requests to an asp.net webservice from the internet to a webserver in my corporate DMZ. On that webserver is a 'proxy' webservice application that takes the requests, and directs them through the firewall to an internal webservice server which processes the request:

             |                     |
internet --> | <-- Web server -->  |  <--> Webservice Server
             |                     |
  Public               DMZ        FW    Internal Network

While this approach works generally well, it does have a few drawbacks. Both the actual webservice and proxy webservices must remain in perfect sync. There's also two potential points of failure which can make tracing, logging, and troubleshooting a bit trickier.

What I'd like to do is to allow IIS6 or 7 to take the requests to a given URL, and automatically redirect them to the internal webservice server without any sort of webservice having to be run on the public web server.

I've tried to use virtual directories to redirect to a URL, but that sends a redirection back to the client, which would cause them to try to access the internal server by name from the public internet, which obviously won't fly.

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Brian,

What you want to do is called a "reverse proxy" and it is possible with IIS7. I've done it recently and it works very well thus far. Here is the link I used to guide the process of setting it up.

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/659/reverse-proxy-with-url-rewrite-v2-and-application-request-routing/