i'm using redhat enterprise..
named ok
httpd ok
apache ok
mysql ok
ping ok

everything look fine until I use 'dig' to query my host..i've got the answer but the server status;fail...why this is happen..

can any one show me the way....

'dig' queries the DNS system to find your host's IP address.
If your DNS isn't set up correctly, you might get some error messages.
Can you please post your 'dig' command as well as it's output? That may give
a clue as to what goes wrong.

if i don't have internet connection can I setup DNS server for my home networking...

now i'm using fedora core 4 as a server can i connect to my novell netware server..i can't figure out how use NCP...please show the clue

If you don't have any internet connection and thus no connection to the DNS server of your ISP (internet provider), then you can always set up your own DNS server for your private network.
However, in most cases, you don't need to, unless your home network is really big.

Please give us more information about your network, like the number of computers attached, how they are connected (ie hardware or software routers, network connections), why you have set up the network (for example, the share files, to share a printer, etc). It would also be nice to know if you have any plans of connecting your network to the internet or not.

As for NCP, it is possible to make Linux use the IPX protocol, the protocol that is used by Novell netware
computers for networking. Unfortunately, I can't provide you with any details. Please search this forum or Google for the application of IPX under Linux.

now i have 10 computer with a different OS..and 100/1000 switch 16 port..they all ready connected each other...share file or printer look fine..
i'm build some web base application with PHP,MySQL and Apache as Web Server...each computer must open their browser to use my application..
do i need to set up dns..gimme a clue to solve this think...

PS: I'm using Fedora Core 4 as a server...my client using mandriva, win 98, win 2000 SP4, win 2003 Enterprise and win XP SP2

thank you timmeke...for your consideration...your time

Your network isn't connected to the internet.
This means you can't have a publicly accessible server, like a webserver for the entire internet world,
or an FTP-server, etc.
As long as you don't need any such (publicly reachable) machine, I would not use DNS if I were you.
What does DNS do normally? Well, simply said, it translates hostnames (names of computers) to their IP addresses. DNS is used to look up the IP addresses of all the computers on the internet. Thus, if you want to have a machine that's publicly visible on the internet, you'll need to have a DNS server (either your own or the one of your ISP) that tells the internet computers which IP address they need to use to reach that computer.
For your home network, I don't think you need that yet.

What can you use instead? Well, you can either assign fixed IP addresses to all your computers or you can
use DHCP to automatically assign IP addresses, or a combination of both.

After that, you'll need to set up a router. This router will tell all your computers how they can reach the others. Such a router, used to interconnect a small network, is commonly called a "gateway". Think of a gateway as a computer that holds your network together, as the computer that is the only point of contact for all your network computers in case they want to reach each other.

In the simplest case, just assign host names and static IP addresses, specifying the IP address of your server (the FC4 machine) as the IP address of the "gateway" (both Linux and Windows machines need an IP address, a subnet mask and the IP address of the gateway to be able to interact in a network). Forget DNS for now.
On the FC4 machine, however, you'll need to set up a routing service. I think you need to use "iptables" for that. It can act both as a router and a firewall, if I'm not mistaken. This router probably only needs to have a list of all IP addresses and their corresponding hostnames.

If you don't want static IP addresses, but rather dynamically assigned ones, you'll need to configure your FC4 box as DHCP server (this is easy and can be handy to share certain system files, like /etc/passwd) and all the others as DHCP clients (no fixed IP addresses in this case).

If you were wondering what IP addresses and subnet mask you could use:
since your network is isolated from the internet, it doesn't really matter. But, just to make sure you don't need to reconfigure too much if you ever decide to connect it to the internet, I'd recommend using IP addresses in the range 192.168.*.* Such addresses are "private addresses", that are never reachable by the outside internet. When you connect to the internet, this configuration will come in handy (if you'll only have 1 internet connection for all your machines).
The only address you may never use to interconnect your machines is 127.0.0.1, because this address reserved
for the "localhost" network interface, which is nothing more than a network connection on each of your machines that connects the machine to itself.

For the subnet mask, again, it's up to you, but I'd recommend something like 255.255.255.0, which is very common.

thanks for the solutions...i will try iptables..and I hope i'm not buggin you again....big thanks...