[TriLUG] (no subject)

Geoffrey Douglas Purdy gdpurdy at unity.ncsu.edu
Fri Nov 30 17:32:54 EST 2001


I've been pulling my hair out over a problem for the last two days
and I'd love some suggestions.  If nothing else, I'd like some reassurance
that my Linux server configuration isn't the source of this problem.

The problem is as follows.  I've set up a Red Hat Linux 7.1 server running
Apache 1.3.22 to serve a website for a private network.  Apache
is running fine -  I can hit the website all day by IP address without
any problem.  The trouble is that when W2K clients running IE6 try to
access the server by its fully qualified domain name (i.e.
http://myserver.mydomain.com) the clients will intermittently get a
"Cannot find server or DNS error" message.  However, client browser can still
access the site by IP address and the client can ping myserver.mydomain.com
successfully.  However, the client browser just can't access the site by
the fully qualified name.  If the W2K client is instructed to reload it's
DHCP information (some command our Windows sys admin issued that I can't
remember), the client browser can then access the Linux webserver by fully
qualified domain name without a problem.

I thought I had found the problem when I looked in the Network
Configuration -> Names tab on the Linux server and saw the following:

Hostname: myserver
Domain: mydomain.com
Search for hostnames...:
Nameservers:
<internal DNS server IP here>
<external DNS server IP here>


I changed the above to:

Hostname: myserver.mydomain.com
Domain: mydomain.com
Search for hostnames...:
Nameservers:
<internal DNS server IP here>
<external DNS server IP here>


In the Network Configuration -> Hosts tab I left things alone as:

IP                  Name                   Nicknames
127.0.0.1           localhost.localdomain  localhost
<IP address here>   myserver.mydomain.com  myserver


After making these changes, I restarted the Linux box.


I realize that there are many layers that could be the source of this
problem.  The DNS servers and clients are all W2K and are administered
by our Windows sys admin so I know little about such things.  I'd like to
focus on the potential for mis-configuration on the Linux server.

What are the chances that my Linux server is at fault here?
Does my Network Configuration look reasonable?
Do I need to revisit my apache httpd.conf file?
Any other suggestions where to look?

Apologies for the verbose message.  Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Geoff




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