I have a SharePoint farm with two WFEs. I have 1 web app with anonymous access enabled and windows authentication and 1 site collection within the web app. I have extended the web app to internet zone using same windows auth mechanism and anonymous access to enable calls coming in on two different hostnames (abc123.com and www.abc123.com) using alternate access mapping.
When I access the original web app url (abc123.com) via either WFE it works fine When I access the extended web app url (www.abc123.com) on one box it redirects to /pages/default.aspx and works fine on the other WFE it fails with a 404 and doesnt redirect.
Any ideas what the problem could be or areas I could check? Cheers Russell
Russ,
Barring additional information, my gut makes me think that IIS and web sites contained within may be involved. Have you gone into Internet Services Manager and confirmed that the (IIS) web site is present for the extended web application on the problem server?
If the site responds properly on one box but not the other, my suspicion is that you might be encountering issues with the SPAdmin service (that is, the Windows SharePoint Services Administration service). SPAdmin is responsible for carrying out tasks and jobs that originate at the Central Admin site on other servers within the farm. It does handle IIS-related provisioning operations, so if this service isn't running or is encountering problems on one of your WFEs, that WFE may not have been provisioned to handle the alternate URL.
In this situation, I'd also recommend having a look at the status of timer jobs (in Central Admin) to see if a provisioning operation for the box in question failed ... or is still pending. Recycling the timer service (SPTimerV3) certainly couldn't hurt as a low-impact, quick step.
If actions with these services produces no results, consider removing the web application extension and re-extending it to the zone in question again.
I hope this helps!