> The solution would be to sort out the internal DNS forwarder but until I
> get my head round bind the workaround is to put the domain name in my
> local 'hosts' file
bind is *dead easy*.
For most distros these days, it's just a case of installing it & starting
it up. That usually gives you a local forwarding resolver (which is
invariably *much* faster than the one youtr ISP provides).
If you're running bind9 (and you should be), you can define "views". This
allows your resolver to supply different results to different people; so,
for example, in my config file, I define two views :-
acl Local_network {
10.0.0.0/8;
};
view internal {
match-clients {
localnets;
};
<snip stuff here>
};
view external {
match-clients {
any;
};
<snip stuff here>
};
This gives a totally different set of results for clients on my LAN,
compared to anyone coming in from the Internet (I run an
externally-visible resolver).
Now I just build appropriate settings (i.e. zone files) into each of the
blocks above.
First time round - it's much easier to do this sort of thing through Webmin!
The one thing to remember about DNS is that the trailing dot is
*important* - it signifies the difference between absolute and relative
names. So, in the "beer.org.uk" zone, "www" (without a trailing dot) means
"
www.beer.org.uk." (with one). This leads to the common mistake of
forgetting the dot on absolute names - so the zone file contains
"
www.beer.org.uk", which (because it doesn't have the trailing dot) is
interpreted as "
www.beer.org.uk.beer.org.uk.". And doesn't do what you
wanted...
HTH
Vic.
