Apache doesn't answer request for page...?

Greetings all. This is a great forum you have here. 1st time post...clutch of pulled hair in one hand and mouse under the other.

Scenario: We're in the process of moving our company's intranet site over to Apache. The site was previously running on Win98SE Personal Web Server.

Problem: The Win98 PWS responds to requests for website "http://company-intranet" based on the PC's NETBIOS name being "company-intranet". Now that we are moving to Apache on Linux, we can no longer request the website by its NETBIOS name since Linux is DNS dependent for name resolution (I think). Without building a BIND DNS server solely to resolve requests for "company-intranet", is there another way the desktop clients can resolve "http://company-intranet" to the private IP address? Is DNS + Apache the only way? We've attempted to build our own BIND DNS server, but alas we have had no success. It appears BIND caters to FQDN on the web. We just need to resolve a bogus name to a local IP.

Specs: SuSe Linux 8.2 Pro, Apache 1.3.23, Squid Proxy, Webmin for configuring files.

I know I am probably missing some pertinent information. It's the end of the day and right now I am just burned out.

Many thanks in advance to any advice or suggestions worth attempting.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by eugenefl

Greetings all. This is a great forum you have here. 1st time post...clutch of pulled hair in one hand and mouse under the other.

Scenario: We're in the process of moving our company's intranet site over to Apache. The site was previously running on Win98SE Personal Web Server.

Problem: The Win98 PWS responds to requests for website "http://company-intranet" based on the PC's NETBIOS name being "company-intranet". Now that we are moving to Apache on Linux, we can no longer request the website by its NETBIOS name since Linux is DNS dependent for name resolution (I think). Without building a BIND DNS server solely to resolve requests for "company-intranet", is there another way the desktop clients can resolve "http://company-intranet" to the private IP address? Is DNS + Apache the only way? We've attempted to build our own BIND DNS server, but alas we have had no success. It appears BIND caters to FQDN on the web. We just need to resolve a bogus name to a local IP.

Specs: SuSe Linux 8.2 Pro, Apache 1.3.23, Squid Proxy, Webmin for configuring files.

I know I am probably missing some pertinent information. It's the end of the day and right now I am just burned out.

Many thanks in advance to any advice or suggestions worth attempting.

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How do your windows clients currently resolve domain names? do you use your ISP's DNS servers, or you have a local Windows DNS server? If you have a local windows DNS server, consider adding an entry there to resolve that name. Alternativly, i belive you can add an entry to each windows client's LMHOSTS file, you will need to google for lmhosts to get some info on how it is done as im not sure myself. Alternativly , you could install samba on your linux box so it becomes a NETBIOS client in your workgroup.

Jason

I'm not sure EXACTLY how, but if the clients are windows based you can use the hosts file (somewhere in the windows directory) to say if u hit say: "http://company-intranet" (as in ur case) from the hosts file it will then get the relevant IP address. eg 192.168.0.x then instead of failing to load "http://company-intranet" will load whatever's at 192.168.0.x (the web server.)

Hope this helps. If i find out how to get this goin meself, i'll let u know!

Just to follow up on this issue, we ended up installing and configuring BIND for local intranet name resolution. What's bothersome is how BIND doesn't allow bogus name entries such as "company-intranet". In this case, we had to do "company-intranet.int" for it to work. Odd...

Anyways, this looks like a great place to find information and to help others. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute.

It will allow bogus names as long as they fit the name standard. at the minimum you must have two parts to a name so http://www.test should work. most people use whatever.local for this purpose.

In windows 98, netbios and TCP/IP are mixed so that neither of them have a good implementation. Although you are using the netbios name of your pc http://mypc it is also the tcp/ip name of your pc - it doesn't really have a FQDN but if it did - on the same pc it should be able to deal with it.

You could have used a HOSTS file and listed the FQDN names and ip addresses of the pcs. this would then have needed to be copied to every pc.