Shorten cognos URL from http://server-name/ibmcognos to cognos10?

[owensct]

Hi All,

I'm curious if anybody knows a way where I can morph the URL that my users have to type to get to Cognos from http://server-name/ibmcognos in such a way so that as long as they are on our network all they have to do is type cognos10 in the address bar?

Granted it not that big a deal, and my users currently have the shortcut on their desktops to get to our production version of cognos (ReportNet  :-\ nobody would remember the ReportNet URL except an UberGeek, its http://server-ip/crn/cgi-bin/cognos.cgi?b_action=xts.run&m=portal/cc.xts&m_tab=w) but if they are trying to get there from a different computer that doesn't have the shortcut they don't remember the exact URL

I asked my network admin and he didn't know of a way and I asked IBM and they didn't know of a way. We are using IIS with Cognos.

Just thought I would throw it out to the forum to see if anyone knows if this is doable and/or how to accomplish it.

Cheers,

Gordon

[SomeClown]

I think you probably want a URL redirect with a DNS entry - you'd need your network admins to make that change (it's a network setting, not Cognos). 

[Suraj]

All you have to do is create a CNAME for the Cognos server.
Contact your networking team as suggested above.
This is actually best practice as you can change Cognos server without impacting users by just re-pointing the CNAME to new server.

[owensct]

Thanks for the responses. I will have to bring it up to my network admin again, as the last time we spoke about it he couldn't figure out how to do it.

Cheers,

Gordon

[MMcBride]

I am not sure what a CName is but it sounds like what I have used here.

There are 2 things I have done to accomplish this at my company.

1 - Create a DNS Alias for the server
2 - Set an HTML Redirector on the root web server

The alias allows my users to type in
http://cognos
To get to the cognos environment and since we have pass through authentication it takes them right to their default Cognos view.

The alias translates http://cognos to http://really_long_servername.that.is.fully.qualified

The redirector simply redirects traffic to the server to the Cognos cgi directory

<meta http-equiv="refresh"content="0;URL=http://server-ip/crn/cgi-bin/cognos.cgi?b_action=xts.run&m=portal/cc.xts&m_tab=w">

[Rutulian]

Just for geekiness, you could also manipulate each and every user's hosts file (see google/wikipedia) to explicitly point to your server's IP... but that's a crap solution and the right thing to do is DNS aliasing.

This is definitely in your network admin's area of responsibility.

Steve Gibson's SecurityNow podcast http://twit.tv/show/security-now/323is doing an excellent walkthrough of how the internet works, starting right down at IP level.  If you have a few hours to spare on the drive home it's a very comprehensible way in, far better than reading documents about protocol stacks.  I don't think they've covered DNS yet, but it will be coming up pretty soon.

[t-mms]

hi

i know, its an old post but:

redirect via iis7 is easy and done in a few steps. click in iis configuration on "default web site", then on the right on the "http redirect", double click.

- type in the destination url
- mark "only redirect request to content in this directory (not subdirectories)"
- set "status code" to "permanent (301)"

done :) restart IIS (maybe use console command : iisreset)

[charon]

ty for sharing ;)

[Francois51]

Just did the http redirect the same way t-mms did and it works like a charm.

However I've noticed a strange behaviour due to Internet Explorer I didn't know about :

If you have a favorite named COGNOS taht points automato http://