I'm having trouble accessing the domain name of my webserver from within the network it resides on. For example, I want to access the website from my workstation so I type in http://www.mydomain.com. I get a timed out message from within my browser. If I type the ip address which is 10.0.0.6, I have no problems accessing the site. I do have a problem with our hivemail installation, which says mail.mydomain.com could not be found (the hostname for the server is mail.mydomain.com). The domain is pointing to the router, which in turn is pointing all HTTP and mail ports to the server IP.

The server is running Slackware 10 without X installed.

Basically I'm pretty new with domain names and routing, so I'm wondering if I'm missing a setting or such since I would assume I could simply put in the domain name on my browser to access the server on the internal network.

have you added it to /etc/hosts?

I'm no expert but I hope this might point you in the right direction

I just tried tacking that into /etc/hosts as you mentioned, however it doesn't seem to be helping. I have two DNS servers, the main one being a Windows 2003 domain and the other being built into my firewall (running BIND I would imagine). This problem I'm having is when trying to access the server from a windows machine...to the outside world the nles.k12.wi.us address seems to work just fine except when you don't specifiy index.php to the address in php scripts. It always says "mail.mydomain.com cannot be found". If you specify the index.php, things are peachy.

Sorry, can't help any further, I have little experience of these things.
However, I had one experience with my 4-port router which would only allow the use of names ending in .dydns.org (or similar) and I was forced to use my linux box direct (without the router in the way) in order to use the name you see below in my sig. no-ip.com provided a small daemon - called "noip2" - to maintain sychronisation with their dns server.

Try making it

10.0.0.6 www.mydomain.com
10.0.0.6 mail.mydomain.com

This could be a quick fix to a bigger problem. You mentioned that there is a windows server running on the network and it is running a DNS server? Should the windows DNS server know that mydomain.com points to 10.0.0.6? In other words the question would be "Will other clients on your network on other machines ALSO need to know that mydomain.com points to 10.0.0.6?

Yes, I'm starting to wonder if this is more Windows related (setting the DNS server to accept mydomain.com as 10.0.0.6 and vice versa). I'll give it a shot and see what I come up with.

So far I think DNS is a pain in the arse

All right, after wading through the Win2k3 DNS I:

1. Created a new primary zone
2. Named it mydomain.com
3. Added a class A host to it called mail with the ip 10.0.0.6

Everything seems to be in order now. Sorry for posting this on a Linux forum seeing as it's a Win2k3 issue, but I really appreciate the help guys, thanks!