PCA Forums

alright, i am trying to get this damn hosts file to work, i have been looking shit up about it for like a week now, and i still cant get it working. this is what i am thinking. At this school i am interning at, they have this internal mail server which is

192.168.xx.yy:8383

well the stupid thing onlyu comes up half the time, apparently from DNS loopback? er thats the conclusion that i have come to? since what happens, you go to the website, http://www.servekids.org and click on the mail link. from outside it works fine, but from inside the school, it comes up page cannot be displayed, more then half the times you clikc on it. However, we have been making shortcuts for the teachers on the desktop that points directly to the IP addy, which always works, since it isnt looking up the DNS outside the local network?? Or like i said, that is what i have concluded.

so i wrote the host file like this

192.168.xx.yy:8383 mail.[mysite].org #mail

shouldnt that work? or can you not add ports to the IP in the host file?

I appreiciate your help with this to anyone who can help >> Thanks a lot!

-Tim

You shouldn't need to specify a port. I don't even think you CAN specify a port. I would recommend this:

192.168.40.17 MAIL.WESLEYINSTITUTE.ORG

HOWEVER that IP address an internal LAN address. If this is a domain accessible from the internet it wouldn't be a good idea to use the server's internal IP address.

I just did a reverse DNS and your mail server's actual IP address is 208.249.101.37, so I'd use this:

208.249.101.37 MAIL.WESLEYINSTITUTE.ORG

I would also recommend you use CAPs for the name as I did above.

This may fix your problem, but of deeper importance is WHY it's not resolving properly on the internal LAN while it works fine on the Internet.

Is the LAN being managed by a server or is it connected directly to a router? Sounds like you've got DNS issues on the LAN.

Thanks for the quick response. I cant seem to figure out why the DNS isnt looking up. We use 2 specified DNS servers. One internal and one External. I have tried them in both orders, and once in a while, it wokrs but alot of times it doesnt.

I am just the intern, so i dont have access to everything here, but it sems that the internet is done by a router, but the domain login for all the users in the building is done by a server. But from the wireing that i can see, it doesnt go to the server.

I will try that other IP you gave me which is supposed to be the real ip of the mail server?
Thou that IP is probally our outside IP cuz our Email server is right here in the building, and we only have 1 T1 going out. But let me try it, and thanks again.

grr. That didnt work either, now correct me please if i am wrong FP, but the hosts file has to be named just hosts with no extension right? And the location for this is in the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc correct???