Dennis, yeah sounds like you are having the exact same problems I was having. I think the whole issue had to do with subdomains and perhaps the app server (tomcat in my case) not doing it quite as expected. I had the exact same results - if I changed the virtual host to have a "www" in front of it for the seconddomain, then if a user didn't input the www, it'd go to firstdomain and if i left it out, then if someone typed www.seconddomain.com it went to first domain. I think it all has to do with handling of the subdomain "www" (or not, if you put it in the virtual host). I don't think it is a DNS setting issue, I have the same settings as you have. I think its b/c your hosting two domains on the same IP address and its Tomcat not handling it correctly. Are you using Tomcat+LifeRay? I bet if you put a reverse proxy in front, that may solve the issues. I think its Tomcat that is not handling it quite properly and not necessarily LifeRay.
So, although not perfect, the fix I suggested does work. For the virtual host of your second portal instance (assuming this is what you are doing), leave out the www and just put seconddomain.com. Then in the community in the 2nd portal instance (w/ the seconddomain.com), I put a virtual host in THAT community of www.seconddomain.com. This fixed the problem and I was able to do seconddomain.com and www.seconddomain.com and it both pointed to second domain. If you have multiple communities or organizations, you can probably take a similar approach still.
I'm not an expert in DNS and app servers, but from trying to remember the research I did in investigating this issue, it all had to do with resolving the "www" subdomain ONCE it hits the server. If you can hit your server using www with your second domain, it seems like then it is set up correctly. Its not really a DNS issue per se, its once the request gets to your server, how it handles that subdomain. And from the looks of it, by default, www defaults to your first portal instance, whatever that domain may be. I didn't do much beyond that, but I'm guessing if you used a reverse proxy or something like that (or even maybe JBoss or something a bit more flexible and powerful than Tomcat), you could probably fix the issue w/o having to worry about virtualizing the community.
Good luck and let me know if that made sense. Like I said, if you are interested in getting it fixed as is, I know it does work if you use a virtual host for the community. Another option besides the proxy server may be to soem virtual host configuration in Apache. Apache supports virtual hosts and you can do rewriting rules and such to get things to work.
Dennis Nes:
Hey Rice,
I am having exactly the same problem. But after changing the virtual host to www.seconddomain.com (Contol Panel - Settings - General, right?) I am being redirected to the firstdomain.com after typing in seconddomain.com. Do have have access to your DNS settings. Mine are as fallows:
*.seconddomain A [myip]
seconddomain A [myip]
Thanks
