Hello,

I have a small home network of 6 machines - each with a static internal network address.

I would like to setup DNS on my Linux server so that I can get around the machines using hostnames.

I found a couple of documents on the Internet about setting up named so I thought I'd have a go.

I told my server to use itself for DNS (and not my gateway) and started named - everything is OK, I can dig external addresses, nslookups, pings the works.

Next I tried to setup a domain to include my internal hosts. This was only partially successful. I am able to resolve the hostname of the server to an IP but non of the other internal addresses I added seem to work. When pinging they resolve the external IP address of my router?!

Is a domain neccessary to accomplish this task?
Would I need to connect my Windows PC's to the domain for them to use the DNS, or would I just change TCP/IP settings to look at my server for DNS information?

Thanks in advance...

Have you tried including the internal IPs on your /etc/hosts? On your DNS, include your server running named and I hope it will resolve it.

Hmmm...
Doesn't Linux use /etc/hosts before it even tries DNS?
If I put the internal hosts in there it would no doubt work for the server, but my other computers (windows) wouldn't be any better off...

Or am I totally wrong about this?

You can also set the order either host or dns to search from. Have you tried putting the IP of your DNS on the DNS server entries on your Windows client? It should work that way.