I am trying to learn more about intranet's and how domain names, etc are resolved, naturally this has led me in the direction of DNS a few times.
I'm still confused though, if all I wanted to do was have some internal domains names (ie: http://www.pcspectra.dev) what exactly needs to be done?
I assume that I can use the TLD .dev when setting up an intranet?
I have 4 computers connected to a wireless linksys router. I have one machine act as a linux server which I develop software on before uploading to my shared host in the Internet.
I typically access the server using the IP 192.168.1.103 (or whatever DHCP assigns -- but it's typically static unless I unplug router or power failure) but ideally I would like to use a FQDN like http://www.pcspectra.dev
Is it possible to configure my router to recognize that FQDN and somehow route all requests to the computer of the matching IP? Even if I have to re-assign the domain to the IP when power failure, I really just want this domain to work internally and the router config options seem to require me to use DynDNS.com (or similar) which as I understand is for serving web pages to the Internet and to assist in re-mapping the IP to domain when my IP is updated/changed by my ISP???
Everything I have read thus far mentions DNS, but I would rather avoid messing with the beast.
Does a router typically allow this kind of intranet configuration? Do I absolutely have to use DNS? Which computer would have DNS installed? The linux machine? If this is the case, how then do my Windows machines know that when the domain's I mention above are requested, they are to use the Linux machine DNS and not the Internet? Do I add the domain and TLD to each Windows machine hosts files?
Any help greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Alex