Hi!

I have a bit trouble understanding the concept of hostname and domain name.

I'm setting up a small network with 2 Windows computers and a Linux server. The Linux server is running Apache, Mysql and Samba.

The names used are just examples, to keep it simple and general.

The Windows PCs are named PC1 and PC2 and is member of the same workgroup called WORKGROUP.

What should the hostname and domain name of the Linux server be? Is there anything that I should think of in order to make Windows and Linux communicate better or easier?

I have registered a dynamic DNS name, and it should point to the Linux server. How does this affect the hostname/domain name of the linux server?


Anyway, thanks for any input!

If you are using windows workgroups it's not really the same as a domain. To connect to windows machines using windows networking you need to setup samba. The smb.conf file for samba has the workgroup setting in it. If you use windows networking you can access it by the netbios name. It would be the same as accessing any windows machine with network neighborhood.

As far as domain goes this is totally different. To have a domain you would need to have an ip address that will resolve to the domain. This requires a dns server. If you have registered a domain name and set it to your machines ip address, then the machine can be accessed by the domainname.

If you are just doing workgroup networking then you just need to setup samba. You can leave the domainname on the linux box set to localdomain.

The hostname can be anything you choose. If you want other machines to access the hostname by dns using a browser or other tcpip connection you need dns. Or manual client configuration would be required, using the hosts file

Here is an example

I have a domain that is registered to linux boxes ip.

from the internet you will always access the linux box no matter what name you put in front of it

example:

mydomain.com
mail.mydomain.com
www.mydomain.com
anything.mydomain.com

all of these will point to the same ip address, because that's all I have.

Locally I can use dhcp to setup all other machines to have a lan address and use a dns server to make each name point to the right machine. The local machines will need to be using my dns server for this to work.

www.mydomain.com
mail.mydomain.com
firedragon.mydomain.com
winxp.mydomain.com
winme.mydomain.com
slacker.mydomain.com


all of these locally would access the machine with that hostname