An alternative to using host files, especially if you have many machines on your LAN you want to point to your LAN web server is to set up a name server on one of your Linux boxes.
You can manage your name server by installing Webmin, which makes this almost painless. Then you have to configure all your other boxes to use that Linux server as the name server. At this point, you can set up forwarding on the name server to pass requests along to other name servers, and you can define domain names only your LAN will care about. My own set up has a Linux box acting both as the name server and as the DHCP server -- which is also managed by Webmin. I use the DHCP server to hard-associate IPs to MAC addresses, and use the name server to associate names to those IPs. Works like a champ, and eliminates the problems with keeping all those tedious host files everywhere in sync. If you are developing multiple websites like I am, there is an added benefit -- you can use wildcarding in the name server on you LAN to create secondary "domains" for the many different sites on the fly. For instance, I have *.jupiter defined so I can do xf.jupiter, fff.jupiter, csw.jupiter, etc. just by configuring apache for each test site. You cannot do wildcarding with host files. And of course, now that all boxes on my LAN use the name server, they all see the wildcarded sites, aiding in further testing. My approach will be overkill if you only have one or two machines on your lan and only one website you are testing. But it's fun nontheless. -- Fred -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- place "[hey]" in your subject. The mass of humans on planet Earth -- regard them as the ebbing seas in the winds of change. They ebb, they flow, they know not where to go. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
