local "in-house" domain, sorry to ask a dumb question

[Barry Margolin]

In article <8f6kus$9mr$1 at nnrp1.deja.com>,  <ryanbooz at alumni.psu.edu> wrote:
>Hey folks,
>
>Sorry to ask what I think is a dumb question.  I've been reading the
>DNS-HowTo and looking at a number of other documents, but I'm still
>really confused about something and just want a point in the right
>direction.  I teach at a school and am working with some kids on web
>servers.  Obviously we can get to the webserver if we use the IP address
>for that server.
>
>Now, what I'd like to do have the DNS server (cacheing-only at the
>moment) I have resolve the hostname of that server to its address.  I
>guess I just don't understand how it resolvs names or what domain I need
>to specify.  In my "hosts" file, I have an entry for each machine that I
>would like to be able to resolve to.  So if I ping any of the names, it
>resovles it and pings away.  However, if I try to use HTTP to get to
>that name, it doesn't go.  I thought that the DNS, because of the
>"host.conf" file was to look at the "hosts" file first and then go to
>the internet.
>
>So, if I have a hosts file that looks like this:
>
>192.168.0.1 	server
>192.168.0.2	server2
>
>I can ping their name and get the address.  What do I have to do to get
>DNS to resolve these names also without searching outside for them,
>where there obviously isn't a listing.

The DNS server doesn't use the hosts file.  You need to make your DNS
server authoritative for your local domain, and enter the server names into
its zone file for the domain.

The other alternative is to copy that hosts file to all the machines on
your LAN.  They'll look there first, and then query DNS.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
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