here's the deal: i'm running red hat 9, with an apache web server [php support for postgres and mysql, blah blah blah], i recently registered a domain name, and had a friend set up my name servers [i needed two]
everything was working fine, but i wanted to change the name of my red hat machine from "localhost.loacaldomain" to something else, and have an alias in my dns so i can just telnet to it directly via the name [not the ip]. the way i did this was in the networking window, in the dns tab, i changed the name, i also put the name in my dns [revers and forward, oh, im running BIND DNS server btw], and now when i boot up, i get an invalid "mydomain" and "myhostname" AND httpd can't find the server name

is there a way so that i can telnet into my linux box [on my network] using just the name of the machine? if so, how would i go about setting that up?

put the ipaddress and name in /etc/hosts

or correctly configure a local dns server.

It is most likely that apache tries to do a nslookup on it's ip (the ip of the machine it is running on) and it unable to determine it's own host name.

You can add a line in the hosts file for your machine, add a host entery in your DNS server for this machine. Or in the httpd.conf file there is a option called ServerName .... adding a value here should solve the problem.

ok, i have added a line into my hosts file, and into my DNS server, but i still can not access my linux machine with just the name of the computer [which is what i want to be able to do], any help with this?

It needs to be in the hosts file of the computer trying to access it, or use dns.

The computer accessing it needs to be setup to use the dns server that resolves the name to the ip address.

ok, thanks for the help!