What I’m having trouble accessing is the server when using the computer’s name “MyServer” from around the internal network. The network is set up within the DSL router that provides a gateway to the Internet. Each of the other computers connected to this network have their names visible which the router configured automatically. For this server, the Device List only shows the ip numbers of 192.168.1.64.
How do I configure the server using Webmin/Virtualmin so the DHCP settings on the DSL router can recognize the server by its name: MyServer? I know I can edit the name when logged into the router but how can I configure the server so the router will find the name automatically?
Well, the setup your describing is a bit trickier, and requires using something like BIND views.
What you’re asking for us to have two different ways of accessing your server; one from the outside world, which uses your systems external IP – and one for the LAN, which uses your internal IP.
The best way to accomplish that would be to setup BIND views on the DNS server.
If you have a small LAN, it might be simpler to just setup a few static entries for your server in your desktops host file
I’ve started reading the book “DNS and BIND”. I’ve been reading the Virtualmin/Webmin documentation wiki, this fourm, and numerous Google searches. I’m trying to put things into perspective and hopefully start making some sense of this material. My plans are for a more sophisticated network environment than my original question would indicate.
I’ve stumbled upon the url “http://MyServer.local” which works from my Ubuntu laptop to display the server’s default web page but a different computer on the same network running Windows XP thinks it needs to make a dial-up connection when I use that url.
Is the *.local url something specific to a Unix/Linux environment?
I’m starting to understand what happened. I have my server and other computers connected on a residential 2Wire router with DSL service. It has been is acting as the only DNS server for name resolution and DHCP assigning dynamic DNS addresses in the 192.168.1.64 to 192.168.1.253 range. It uses 192.168.1.254 as the gateway address. The addresses from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.63 are reserved for static assignment.
The IP address for my server 192.168.1.64 was assigned by the router at the time I installed the Ubuntu server and Webmin/VirtualMin software. I have reassigned my server to use 192.168.1.1 instead and added the server name to the 2Wire DNS name table manually.
While that lets me locate the server by name now, I still suspect something is not completely configured with my new server’s DNS environment.
