[RayJ]

We just started hosting our own website. Our ISP is hosting our domain name. Everything with our website works fine and people can type in our domain name into their web browsers and pull up our web site.

One problem that I do have, within our local area network. If someone types in our domain name, for our site, the browsers will not pull up the web site. Just an error saying, "Can't connect to server". But if we type in the IP address of the local machine in the LAN the web page will pop up fine.

So, how do I get our domain name to work within our LAN? The user computers in this network are mixed Win and Mac.

The server machine that is hosting our site is:

Mac OSX 10.2.8 Server
Web Server software is Apache.

I was told by one person, who is a PC user, to go to all our local computers and modify some network config file that matches certain IP addresses with domain names. This to me seems a little archaic. There has to be an easier way?

[geekwagon]

Not sure if you have figured this problem out or not, but just in case:

Sounds like DNS resolution problems. I see this all the time when a website is hosted outside the company. The usual scenario is that the company is internally using the same domain name as the web site, but the internal DNS servers are NOT the same servers that host the external DNS (which is usually done by the hosting company.)

Your internal DNS servers are probably configured to be "authoritave" for the domain, and don't contain the IP/hostname mapping for the web server outside the LAN.

To test this, you can open Terminal and type:

dig www.sample.com (obviously replace the hostname with your real web site address.) That will give you a bunch of name resolution info (like what server it asked, etc.)

The method mentioned below (editing the host file on all the machines) would work, but you really ought to find the root of the problem, IMHO.

[RayJ]

No I have not found an answer to this problem.

I will try what you mentioned above.

I hope you understand that we are hosting our own website on our own web server in our own LAN. The DNS is being handled by our ISP. So when ever some one types in our web address it goes to them and they forward it to our local web server on our LAN.

[geekwagon]

Originally posted by RayJ:
No I have not found an answer to this problem.

I will try what you mentioned above.

I hope you understand that we are hosting our own website on our own web server in our own LAN. The DNS is being handled by our ISP. So when ever some one types in our web address it goes to them and they forward it to our local web server on our LAN.

On one of the machines that is having problems, find out what DNS server they are using to resolve addresses. On OS X, open Terminal, type nslookup, hit enter, then type server and hit enter. That will tell you which DNS server you are using. On Windows, you can open a command prompt, type ipconfig /all (assuming nt4,2k,xp) and DNS is one of the things that will get spit out.

If that server isn't your ISPs DNS server (i.e. it is internal) ask whoever is responsible for it if it thinks it is authoritave for whatever domain your webserver's name is in. If so, have them add the address to the zone so it will resolvable internally.

[Scotttheking]

I'm guessing that your setup is this:
You are hosting the site locally.
Your server has a LAN IP, and port 80 is forwarded to the server.
As a result, you can't resolve the server because your computers are trying to reach the external IP, which will not be forwarded back in.
You have 3 ways to solve it.
1) Host outside your local LAN.
2) Modify the hosts files of every machine to tell it what IP to resolve your domain to.
3) If you have a local DNS server that is used only for your internal machines, you can add an A record for your domain that points to your local LAN IP.