Bind listening socket to domain name

[Kirsle]

With a Linksys router, is it possible for a computer to open a listening socket (server) using a domain name as its host? For example:

$sock = IO::Socket::INET->new (
   LocalHost => 'chat.mysite.com',
   LocalPort => 6667,
);

Before I got my Linksys router, I could do this, assuming that the domain 'chat.mysite.com' had an A record pointing to my external IP address. But now, 'chat.mysite.com' would be pointing to my router's IP address, and this seems to complicate it.

I have my router set up to forward every port to one computer which is on 24/7 (the other computer is a laptop), so this one runs my servers. Currently it runs an Apache HTTP server which can accept connections, and it's set up to bind to 127.0.0.1:80, but when I bind my own server to 127.0.0.1:6667, it makes it only available to my local network.

Also, my server can't bind to my external IP address either, which I thought was a little odd, since it seemed to be a similar setup than binding to a domain name (since the domain could directly connect to my computer, but in this case the router would be directly connected to my computer).

The closest I could get was to bind it to 192.168.1.100:6667 (my internal IP address), and this made it accessible through chat.mysite.com on the local machine, but on my laptop, I couldn't connect to the server through chat.mysite.com

Does anyone know how to do this? I want it to bind to a domain name to guarantee its visibility to the outside world, so that a chat client can connect to chat.mysite.com:6667 instead of having to enter an IP address.

Thanks in advance.

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