Topic: What is in a name?

[BillN]

I am not exactly sure of what to search for, but I have done some searches here to try and resolve my issue to no avail.

To the best of my remembrance, here is what I did to get in my position:
Had SME 4.? running and stable on P-266 pc with name of gate and using yi.org DynDNS.

Saw SME 5.0 and had to have it. Being cautious and wanting to upgrade the box anyway, I installed 5.0 on to P-III and called it new-gate still using yi.org for DynDNS.

Once the system seemed to be stable and do what all I wanted it to do, I re-ran the server config from the console and changed the name to gate.

Somewhere along the lines I had too much trouble with yi.org so I switched to dyndns.org.

When SME 5.1 was available I had to have it so I upgraded the 5.0 install to 5.1.

Now for the issue:
I am pretty sure that either with the 4.? or 5.0 install I could from the LAN side go to https://gate/e-smith-manager and it would work. Now I have to go to https://192.168.69.1/e-smith-manager to be able to get to the page. If I go to https://billn.homeip.net I get an unauthorised error. I suppose that is normal since it thinks I am trying to access from outside the LAN ?.

Currently I get an "Unable to determine hostname for gate" error if I try it the lazy way. If I go to a command prompt and ping gate, it properly resolves to the IP address and pings away.

During part of the fit of frustration to make what I thought should work work, I added a hostname of just gate to the Hostname and addresses control.

The client is a Win98se box. I have tried both DHCP and manually configured TCP/IP with the same results.

A possible side issue. I have 3 network drives map as "reconnect at startup". When I had first set that up the mappings went by to fast to even see the name of the share it was attaching to. Now, it seems to hang for several seconds and then it connects the drives. This too both in manual and DHCP configured TCP/IP.

Maybe a third issue..... When I look at the Hostnames and addresses configuration page, I still have a reference to billn.yi.org listed. There was the option to remove all of the hostnames (www, ftp, mail...) except for gate and new-gate. So now in Hostnames and addresses I have billn.homeip.net, billn.yi.org, gate, and gate.billn.homeip.net. The only line with a reference to new-gate is the yi.org entry. All others only know it as gate, www, ftp, mail...

Do I have a problem, or am I just being silly?

Thanks for any suggestions,

BillN

[Michael]

What's your client's settings for DNS and WINS? Set e-smith up as DHCP server and leave WINS and everything to be handled by the e-smith box (if possible ). So don't use a hosts file on your clients if they're running in DHCP mode.

The symptoms you describe are IMHO due to name resolution problems.

[BillN]

Server is setup to be DHCP server. Clients are setup by DHCP to use WINS and DNS from the server. I also tried to manually configure the client to point to the server for DNS and WINS.

I fully agree that it is a resolution problem. I have the misfortune of being trapped as a Windows administrator and am trying to become and up and coming Linux guru.

Part of what really baffles me is that when I do a ping gate from the command prompt, it does resolve to 192.168.69.1 and ping, but when I try to do a non-fully qualified HTTP request I get a host not found.

Is there an 'easy' way to look at the DNS tables?

Thanks for your reply,

BIll