Okay, here's what I think I should do.

Assign all PC's (2 of them) on my LAN with static IP's (no DHCP)

Set up a DNS server on my Linux box with hostnames and IPs for the two computers.

Set up PRIMARY DNS server as the linux box on my XP machine; set up SECONDARY DNS on my XP machine as the primary DNS from my cable-modem ISP (or will it get this automatically from my linksys router?)

This (in my sick little mind) should allow me to go to www.mydomain.com and have my XP box's browser connect to a web page hosted on the linux box AND also connect via telnet (provided i have these serviced set up) AND allow proper access to the internet as a whole.

Is there a way to set up the DNS server to automatically forward to another (my ISP's) DNS server for addresses not on my LAN.

Does this sound right?

So far so good...

The theory works for machines inside your network.

You can of course just add the domain name to your XP's lmhosts.sam file and have it go directly, without the dns server...

Have a look at this thread... http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=32073

and this HOWTO ... http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DNS-HOWTO.html

Regards,
Peter

Cool, thanks again, Peter.

Thats what I figured about the /etc/hosts file but i've never hear of the lmhosts.sam file in XP. Is there a way to manipulate it in the GUI or should I just search for it in the file finder and edit it with notepad?

Thanks again, you've been a great help.