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I have just setup Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition. I have been following this tutorial.

The DNS information seems to be setup correctly now, but I am confused about the hostname. Currently it is laughingbuddha.home. That is a name I created.

Now, I am mainly not sure how to connect from another computer on my network. I basically want to be able to put PHP files on the server box and then test them via a web browser on my other computer.

So, I think I digressed from my first question, but would somebody please help me figure out if the hostname is okay for doing what I need to do?

Thank-you!

Update

Per @obfuscurity's advice, I am able to access the server from another computer on the network by typing the IP address of the server into the address bar of my web browser. This is all that I wanted to be able to do, so thank-you!

About the server naming issue:

Here are the first two lines from /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1    localhost.localdomain    localhost
127.0.1.1    laughingbuddha.home      laughingbuddha

Originally, laughingbuddha said something else, like someservername (sorry, I can't remember the exact word, not sure it matters too much), but the .home was there, so I just replaced someservername with laughingbuddha.

Could somebody share a resource that I could read and try to understand why I can't access the server via web browser by typing in http://laughingbuddha.home? Being new to this, I am sure there are some fundamental texts that I should study to understand more.

Thanks again!

2 Answers 2

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That is not a valid DNS hostname (there is no .home top-level domain). I would recommend sticking with the default "localhost.localdomain 127.0.0.1" unless you have a valid need for others to resolve to your host. At the very least, have someone more experienced with TCP/IP networking come show you the ropes.

For now you should be able to just point your browser to the host by IP address.

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  • Valid or not, it's not really wrong. I've seen several models of home-type routers which append .home as the DNS suffix. In actual fact, my BT Home Hub which I am using now does it, and that's a very common router here in the UK. May 15, 2010 at 21:03
  • the guide he linked to covers setting up a local bind server.
    – cpbills
    May 15, 2010 at 21:04
  • @obfuscurity Thanks, typing in the IP address of my server was successful. If you have a moment, I would appreciate any feedback about the edit I just made to my question.
    – Mike Moore
    May 15, 2010 at 21:26
  • @cpbills Technically, any hostname is valid if a nameserver answers queries for it. But .home is still not a valid top-level domain and as such, would not be usable for public traffic. May 15, 2010 at 22:02
  • @letseatfood See a couple of my posts today regarding DNS for clues to your question. DNS is a distributed hierarchal service that performs hostname-to-IP resolution. There are a finite number of top-level domains (TLDs) of which .home is not a valid one. If you really want to do this anyways, you can do it by adding the entry into /etc/hosts of any *nix hosts that you want to be able to reach this server from. It's not a scalable solution, but it's a sufficient workaround for your needs. May 15, 2010 at 22:06
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well, just coming up with a hostname is not going to get you a world-accessible domain name.

if you have bind set up to host caching dns for your home network, you can create whatever hostname you want for your server/workstation, etc. probably best to stay away from .com/.net/.org etc.

in order to serve your DNS entries to your other local computers, you will have to add your home server's IP address as a nameserver on those machines.

then, they will query your server for host information.

a caching server, run in your home, will, when you make a request to it, for google.com, for example, will see if it knows anything about google.com, then it will check up the stream for a name server that knows about google.com, once it gets that information, it stores it/caches it, in your personal server, so future queries for google.com will be much faster.

also, as it will have your zone files in it, for your home network, it will be able to respond to requests for serverx.laughingbuddha.home, with the IP address for that server.

so on your workstation, when you type in http://www.laughingbuddha.home/ it will tell your workstation that is 192.168.1.1

unless i missed what you were asking, feel free to expand.

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  • Thanks for the reply, I edited my question. If you have the opportunity, I would appreciate your feedback.
    – Mike Moore
    May 15, 2010 at 21:25
  • if you want to add that information to the hosts file on the computer you are going to be accessing the server from, you can certainly put http://laughingbudda.home/ in your address bar. in windows, it is located in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts
    – cpbills
    May 15, 2010 at 23:34
  • Thanks, I think I'll just keep it the way it is for now.
    – Mike Moore
    May 16, 2010 at 16:16

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