Hello,

I've been reading up on this "named" daemon that has to do with DNS issues. I also read up on Apache, which also talks about the same thing through its virtual hosts feature.

This is confusing to me, as it seems like this "named" thing is trying to do the same thing that Apache is. Do both need to be configured, does only one of the two, or do the two do completely different things?

I really don't know anything about DNS, so I really don't know what Apache and "named" are really doing.

Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks!

What is it you're trying to accomplish?

One uses named to configure dns (i.e. reolving names to ip addresses)

the virtual hosts section of the apache config uses the name that was used to resolve the current host as a way to select from a number of virtual servers running on the local machine.

THe one allows you to connect (bind) by name.

The second one uses the name you connected with to choose content?

does that make sense?

I think I'm sort of understanding what you mean...

What, then, would happen if you didn't configure "named" but did configure Apache? Wouldn't it still serve up the correct webpages when somebody enters yourdomain.com into their browser?

Thanks.

hi there

if u do not want to use named then u need to do all the service with IP addresss and they will work in apache

regards

Well, all of the web site visitors would have to have an entry in their host table in order to find the web server. That doesn't sound very convenient. Set up the DNS service on a box on your network so your users don't have to be mucking around with their host tables. (That'll just cause problems, you know. )

I don't recall if you mentioned what distribution you're using but there's a good chance that there's a decent tool that lets you configure the DNS files with a minimum of fuss. If you're not the network administrator who tends to the DNS, you'll have to work with whoever that is so that the hostnames for your virtual hosts will resolve to your web server's IP address.

Good luck...

In short, the answer to the question is no.

DNS Allows users to find the machine by name. If this is occuring over the internet, you'll need someone else ( a servie provider / DNS registrar ) to list you domain so that users can find it. If you're doing this on an intranet you can point your hosts to your server for DNS, and that will allow then to connect to your webserver by name.

DNS is really the important part, if you're only going to set one up. It's what allows users / hosts to connect.

All Apache is doing is differentiating content based on the name used to access the machine, ince you can actually use dns to point multiple names to one address.