The situation is this, im trying to run a sever on my schools student network, mainly just for fun. I have samba running on it so that if you are in windows you can simply type say "mondaypickle" in ie and it will go to the server, but this doesnt work in linux of course, i have to use nmblookup to grab the ip. I wanted to set up somthing similar to the smb name resolution but I dont know what to use. Do I need my own DNS server? I also looked at NIS but I think that would require everyone to be running a NIS client. Thanks for any help.

Are you trying to access it over samba? If so, it will automatically perform an nmblookup for you.

no, sorry I should have specified, over http. I just want to run a local webserver.

Ah. In that case, you do need some DNS service providing an IP for the server. If it has a static IP, you could just add an entry to /etc/hosts.