Web Agent Guides › Web Agent Configuration Guide › Single Sign-On (SSO) › Force Fully Qualified Domain Names

Force Fully Qualified Domain Names

Cookies require the use of fully qualified domain names to work properly. The Web Agent can ensure that fully qualified domain names are used for HTTP requests regardless of the URL format a user enters in an incoming request. Enforcing the use of fully qualified domain names, along with the Agent's ability to resolve cookie domains based on incoming host headers, helps SiteMinder manage sites that have many domains across a network. Administrators can let users access a site with any valid form of a URL and still support cookies with the following parameter:

• ForceFQHost

  Forces a Web Agent to use a fully qualified domain name. This parameter uses configured domain name system (DNS) services to force the appending of the cookie domain to the host name in a URL request through DNS services and not an Agent. If the Web Agent receives a request that contains a partial URL, the Web Agent redirects the request back to the same destination resource specified in the original URI. The redirect request uses the fully qualified host name, which the Web Agent determines using the configured DNS services. Use this parameter with the ForceCookieDomain parameter for added functionality.

  Default: No

  Example: When the Web Agent receives a request from http://host1/page.html, it responds with http://host1.myorg.com/page.html. If the Web Agent receives a request such as http://123.113.12.1/page.html, it responds with http://host1.myorg.com/page.html.

  Note: These examples work only if the proper DNS lookup tables are set up. If a partial domain is entered, the result depends on whether or not the DNS lookup can resolve it. If the request resolves as an invalid host, an error will result. Most likely, such a request would not even reach the web server.

To configure the Web Agent to use fully qualified domain names, set the ForceFQHost parameter to yes.