newbee questions....

[Kevin Darcy]

thefluiddruid wrote:

> Hi,
>  I am setting up a nameserver for the first time and I am having some
> problems.
> The nameserver is ns.internetproductions.org , and the domain I am trying to
> set up is http://www.ultimatechoices.com/ .
>
> I am using a linksys router to connect with the internet at ip address
> 205.161.228.147 .
>
> First of all on my host file should I set the ip address to
>  205.161.228.147.   www.ultimatechoices.com.
> 127.0.0.1.   www.ultimatechoices.com.
> or  192.168.***.***.  www.ultimatechoices.com. (the lan address for the
> server)
>
> also which of these IP addresses should I use in my zone files??

You should definitely not publish a 192.168.*.* address on the Internet (that's
a "private" address range, see RFC 1918 for details). What you publish to the
Internet via DNS *must* be the WAN address of your Linksys, and then you need
to configure the Linksys to forward the appropriate port(s) (most likely 80 and
possibly also 443) to your internal server.

For the webserver box itself, you could use either 127.0.0.1 (assuming the web
server is configured to listen to loopback) or the LAN address in your
/etc/hosts, but you'd also have to configure /etc/nsswitch.conf (or the
equivalent) to search /etc/hosts ahead of DNS. Otherwise any client program
will find the WAN address first and try to use it.

If you have any LAN client boxes, or plan to have any in the future, you also
might want to look into "split DNS", where your nameserver serves up different
addresses to internal clients than it does to external clients (note that
implementing split DNS would obviate the /etc/hosts ugliness on your server
boxes too). Searching for that phrase in the archives of this mailing list
should get you plenty of hits; seems like this question gets asked and answered
multiple times a week (mostly answers to Linksys owners' questions, I think
:-).


- Kevin