My home network is set up with a Smoothwall Linux (www.smoothwall.org)
firewall to protect my computers on my DSL connection.  One of my
machines has a web server, and I have port 80 forwarded through the
firewall to this machine.  In order to find my machine "in the real
world", I use a dynamic IP service (no-ip.com) to provide a domain
name which will always resolve to my dynamically assigned IP address.

I'm having a problem with DNS locally.  Outside my home network, I can
access my webserver by going to servername.no-ip.com, but inside my
home network, I have to use the locally-assigned IP address
(192.168.1.128).  I would like to be able to access the server from
servername.no-ip.com while at home as well.  I don't want to set it in
a hosts file locally on the machines, because one is a laptop that
leaves the home network frequently.  I'm pretty sure the answer lies
in a DNS server, but so far, I haven't been able to figure out how to
make that work.

Smoothwall doesn't appear to provide DNS services, but I have an OS X
server available on the home network that I can use for DNS.  The
problem is that I have no idea how to set it up (zones, CNAME, A,
PTR).  Can you provide me with step-by step instructions on how to get
servername.no-ip.com to translate to 192.168.1.128 on my OS X 10.3
server?

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Clarification of Question by lanej0-ga on 12 Dec 2003 12:33 PST

I'll provide a couple of more details, after having played with it last night.

1. OS X 10.3 server uses BIND.  Nothing fancy.
2. Smoothwall, in the DHCP settings, will allow you to specify a
primary and secondary DNS server.  By default, the smoothwall machine
is the primary DNS, secondary is blank (I tried putting in the IP of
my OS X machine).  From this, I'm realizing that I may have been
mistaken that Smoothwall doesn't do DNS (I have no idea).
3. I tried following through Apple's guide for setting up an "A"
record.  Didn't work though.  At home, using the domain name won't
connect.

Help on this would be much appreciated.

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Clarification of Question by lanej0-ga on 13 Dec 2003 19:20 PST

If $10 is too little for an answer to this question, let me know.  I'd
really like to get this resolved, so I would be inclined to "tip" as
well.

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Request for Question Clarification by endo-ga on 13 Dec 2003 20:20 PST

Hi,

Smoothwall does do DNS that's how you're connecting to the Internet
aren't you? You're routing your connection through the Smoothwall
machine, this is a gateway for the rest of your machines and provides
all the services including DNS.

Please try this:

Edit the /etc/hosts file on the Smoothwall and forward
servername.no-ip.com to 192.168.1.128 .

Your other machines should be using the Smoothwall machine as gateway and DNS.

I hope this helps, please let me know how it goes.

Thanks.
endo

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Clarification of Question by lanej0-ga on 14 Dec 2003 09:30 PST

endo,

Thank you so much.  That worked perfectly.  Who knew that it was such
an easy fix?  Here I was trying to figure out how to get BIND working
properly....

Many thanks

Hi,

Thank you for your question.

I'm glad the solution worked out.

Thanks.
endo

Search strategy

smoothwall dns hosts
://www.google.com/search?q=smoothwall%20dns%20hosts

Answer worked perfectly.  Many thanks to endo for providing this solution.

Glad to have been of assistance.
Thank you for the great rating and very generous tip.
Kind regards,
endo