[Xitami] local IP v. domain

[Brian {Hamilton Kelly}]

In message <MABBILGNLFGMJIPJLFFKAEIACCAA.bronder@attbi.com>
   "Michael Bronder" writes:

> My server is also my work station, on a home network behind a netgear
> firewall/router.  From any point behind the firewall I need to type in or
> refer to the local ip address to test scripts or access html pages.  NAT is
> setup to direct port 80 calls to the webserver...
> 
> Is there anyway I can set things up so I can write my perl scripts refering
> to the actual domain of my site and have them work behind the firewall?  Or,
> more simply, for me to type www.archaetext.com into a browser v. the local
> IP address?

Have you thought about running a caching DNS server inside the firewall,
and letting all the machines on your LAN use this for their queries?  It
could then be authoritative for your local internal "domain"; and
requests to resolve an address outside that domain would be passed by the
named to your ISP's (or other) name server, through use of a "forwarders"
line in the configuration file.

That's how I run here: my (this) OS/2 machine is also the NAT router for
the LAN, and runs BIND.  The latter is authoritative for dsl.co.uk, and
answers local queries; anything else is passed on to my ISP's name
servers.  I can get away with this arrangement because so far as the
outside world is concerned, there are only MX records for dsl.co.uk,
which route incoming mail to my ISP's relays which delivers them to me
(by SMTP).  (There's also an entry for www.dsl.co.uk, which is hosted by
my ISP, since I'm only on an ISDN dial-up.)

Incidentally, if adopting this approach, be sure to read what Albitz &
Liu have to say about running such a system: it's probably also covered,
at least in part, by Bellovin & Chadwick in their book on firewalls,
since it's an approach often used on large "intranets" behind a firewall.
In particular, it's a very good idea to have at least two duplicate
forwarders lines, both pointing to the same name servers at one's ISP.
This tends to facilitate getting a response from an external server
before local machines' resolvers decide that it's an "unknown domain".

> ------=_NextPart_000_0000_01C1FCFD.9255B360
> Content-Type: text/html;
> 	charset="Windows-1252"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
> 
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

Please don't dual-post in both ASCII and HTML.  The latter provides no
more information than the plain ASCII, but occupies (on average) 200% of
extra space.

-- 
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}                                          bhk@dsl.co.uk
    "We have gone from a world of concentrated knowledge and wisdom to one of
    distributed ignorance.  And we know and understand less while being incr-
    easingly capable."              Prof. Peter Cochrane, formerly of BT Labs