Okay, I've looked and looked and I cannot find anything in relation to this subject.

I am new to linux although I have been running a simple apache server for the past few months. I am running Fedora Core 4 i386 on the server and Smoothwall Express on my firewall/router.

When on any of my windows computers (or anything else on the network) and I type in the address of my website ie example.com into the address bar, I cannot access the website. Instead, it times out and gives me the 'page cannot be found' error.

I know part of this is due to 'example.com' pointing to my IP address, which in the case of the computers on the network, is like typing in 192.168.1.1:80. I need some help setting up BIND or whatever it is that is required to run a website off a home network and still be able to view the website from inside the network without having to type its IP address into the address bar each time (which does work, by the way).

I could greatly use the help,

Thanks.

A simple fix is to add the linux box's name to the lmhosts file of each Windows machine. You'll find the file with a search, it's in some crazy windows location. There's a lmhosts.sam file which is a sample and has some instructions. The format is basically the same as /etc/hosts in linux.

I think you can add fairly complex names here - like
192.168.0.10 www.mysite.com
then whenever you try to access www.mysite.com, it will go for that IP instead.

Use the hosts file. Setting up bind is an uncessary complication. The poster ahead of me gave you a good run down on how to configure the hosts file.

Ping the IP of the machine you are trying to reach and confirm that the machine you are trying to reach has the IP you think it does. Under Linux as root do ifconfig to see your ip information. If the machine is duel homed it'll have 3 or 4 entries. The eth0 and eth1 are the ones your interested in. Once you can ping it and reach it by IP with your browser then add the ip to your hosts file and you can then type the name in instead. Also you want to give the apache server (edit the httpd.conf file) the same name as you name the server.

If you can't ping the machine by IP then you have a problem with the networking. This could be caused by several problems. If you can ping the machine but cannot reach it by IP with your browser then you may be blocking port 80 in your server's firewall. If your using Fedora or a GUI firewall builder it's easy to allow incoming web hits. Otherwise you have to edit your IPtables configuration. Another possible problem is that your Apache server is not actually running or not listening to outside connections or thinks it should answer to another name. That's easy to fix by checking your apache.conf file. The location of it can be alot of places depending on distro and whether you installed by rpm, yum, tarball and whether you specificed the installation dir when you did. I for example like to create an entire seperate partition for my web severs. Makes backups and extending space using LVM fairly easy it it's own partition.

I am assuming that you are host is localhost

then try this in your browser hope it works

http://localhost

No, the server's ip on my network is 192.168.1.11 and if I type that into the address bar it works fine. If you type the URL of the server (dragontech dot game-host dot org) then it does not work INSIDE the network. If you are outside of the network it works just fine.

are you using the BIND package if yes then I could writte you the complete configuration of your BIND Package


thanks