I have been taking a look at the 2.0 release of the web content management functionality. I am very impressed by the solution taken to handle virtualization. I would like to learn more about how the virtualization works. In particular, I noticed that if I disconnect my network and try to load a virtual page of the form
the page still loads and taking a look at the HTTP traffic, it's not apparent to me how the hostname is being resolved. I took a look at the ports which are active while the servers are up and I noticed that there are some interesting ports opened such as
The virt server has nothing to do with those other open ports on your box. To verify that turn it off and re-run your port scan
The reason why your box can still resolve a name after you've been disconnected from the internet is that your local machine is caching the DNS lookups you did previously. The time to live (TTL) associated with name lookups performed by EchoDNS on ip.alfrescodemo.net is 1 day. Thus to see the lookup fail, reboot your client machine to flush its cache (or if you don't want to do that and can wait a day, the cached DNS record will expire on its own).
At that point, all lookups will fail when if you're both using EchoDNS at ip.alfrescodemo.net and still disconnected from the Internet (which is what you'd expect). EchoDNS is a special-purpose nameserver I wrote to make installing Alfresco's WCM package not require you to modify your own DNS setup.