I'm trying to get PHP5.02 and Apache2 working again having upgraded my slackware from 10 to 10.1. I've got Apache going OK but PHP is acting a bit odd.
The essential problem is that I've got my DNS a little bit awry (this may sound unrelated to PHP but we'll get there).
Before we had broadband my system had no name as there was never a need to access it from the outside world. Now we have broadband I've got a sub-domain pointing at the system:- home.isbd.net 84.51.144.229
I have a router which is what the outside world sees when it connects to home.isbd.net and the NAT and firewall are set up to send packets to the appropriate systems on the LAN side.
Within the LAN I the systems have names such as fred.isbd.co.uk (I own the isbd.co.uk domain) which only exist within the LAN and, on the Linux box, are set up in /etc/hosts. Thus there are entries such as:- 192.168.13.5 fred.isbd.co.uk fred
These are very convenient as one can use the short form 'fred' to connect to that machine.
However there are now some oddities occurring and I'm thinking I may have to change some/all of my hosts file. Firstly PHP keeps using the Linux server box's full name (server.isbd.co.uk) to try and do things and is failing miserably. Secondly for some reason the DNS on the LAN can't find home.isbd.net whereas everyone else in the world can find it and DNS on the LAN works for all other addresses.
In general what do others here do about naming machines on a small SoHo LAN behind a router? Is there some accepted way of doing it?