So I wanted to do something I thought would be fairly straightforward. I have a home network with a PlusNet-provided Technicolor Gateway router and behind that I currently have my (Windows 7) laptop and my HP Proliant Microserver running Lubuntu.
In addition to a media server I want to use my Lubuntu box as a development environment for multiple websites, but I want to be able to access each website from the laptop.
Running multiple sites is easy enough with Apache’s Virtual Hosts feature, and I can configure the /etc/hosts file on my server to let me access them locally. However I want to be able to do the actual work /testing on my laptop (for starters) and have an easy to remember name for each of the virtual hosts.
So here’s what (I think) I need to do:
- Install Apache (and PHP/MySQL) and configure the virtual hosts – check.
- Set up a DNS server on my server
- Configure the laptop to query that server for DNS (preferably through the router config so it applies to the whole network…) let’s come to that later.
Piece of cake, right? Read on for completion of step 2.
Continue reading “Local Home Network DNS – how hard can it be?”