I don't know if this is possible, but I have been doing a bit of research and it seems that I should be able to achieve what I want by employing some DNS software (Bind etc...)

Basically I have my DSL internet connection going into an old PII 233 that runs Smoothwall. I have this setup as a green / orange / red divisions, with the 'red' being the external internet, 'orange' being the DMZ where all my servers live, and 'green' being the internal house network where all the computers in the house connect through.

I have four servers sitting in the DMZ running different apps and for testing etc .. from my desktop I can access each of the servers by their hostnames rather than the internal IP addresses of them as I have all their IP addresses and hostnames in my /etc/hosts file. So ssh etc is simple. However, I can't achieve this for people accessing the servers from the 'outside world'.

For example, two of the servers run webserving software (apache & apache2 for testing) - when I am on my desktop computer (within the LAN) I can surf to the computer that I want to use within a browser using the hostname of the computer, but the only way that I can achieve the same effect for the outside world is to run apache on different ports on the two servers.

I have a Dynamically assigned IP address so I use no-ip for the DDNS. But I want someone to be able to do the following:

www1.domain.com >> server1
www2.domain.com >> server2

etc ....

Obviously the domain is pointing to my IP address, its more the subdomains of that that I want to be able to control for. Is it possible to use some DNS software on one of the servers in the DMZ to achieve this. So basically everything that comes into the network checks which server it should be pointed at??

Thanks guys.

There's no way to do this in the way you're asking as far as i'm aware, as the two things are running at such different networking levels. Instead though, you could use one server, possibly the Smoothwall box if it's up for it, to proxy the http traffic via apache, or something more lightweight i don't know exists.. . Using an Apache proxy it will redirect to other servers based on the server name. Obviously this is a relatively hefty solution, but then if you do have a "main" web server anyway, that's a great place to put it.

now though... someone will probably tell you how to do it the way you want!