I am having problems accessing locally hosted virtual web domains from my internal network. I have a few different domains hosted on my apache web server which runs on a Fedora Core 2 firewall/gateway. All of my internal machines go through this machine to get out onto the Internet. This box also serves DNS for my main domain.

From the outside, I can access all of my virtual domains. In other words, Sitting at my desk at work, I can open up a web browser and go to virtualdomain.com as well as maindomain.com. From inside my network, however, if I go to virtualdomain.com, the DNS request hits my DNS server, my DNS server does and outside lookup and returns a valid external IP address (assigned by my ISP) (the same IP address that works for external clients) but the browser just hangs. maindomain.com works just fine.

Any ideas about where to start looking would be greatly appreciated.

Can you ping the external IP address from your internal network?
If the browser hangs, you probabky can't. So I suspect there might be some firewall problem.

Yes, I am able to ping my virtual domains from an internal host.

I can get to the web sites from my firewall/gateway machine itself, just not from hosts that go through it. I'm wondering if it has something to do with ip_forward/firewall too. Just not sure what else to check.

Well, I was able to get around this by adding DNS zones for my virtual hosts. Something must have changed in iptables or something because I know this worked before :-)