domain name on home network

[pcarver]

I've currently got a computer at work with registered domain name, call it X.com. I am porting everything over to linux at home with the anticipation of changing the DNS to point to my new linux box.

Currently, the host name is woodchuck and the domain is localdomain.

I'm INSTALLING qmail and it wants to know stuff like your domain name. Other programs want to know this and give examples like xyz.com. My local machine here doesn't have a .com domain. I'm really confused! Can/should I give my computer a .com domain or what?

/paul

 

[miblo]

Unless you don't have a fixed IP-address on your home machine, or an updating DNS (see

http://www.dyndns.org),

you're at loss. To just send mail from your machine, you don't need a domain-name, but if you want to recieve mail - you do.

To have mail forwarded to your machine at home, you need a domain name which can map the IP-address to your mail-server (the MX-record). DynDns.org (NOT DynDns.com!) has a nice feature for this.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

If you want to host <the> smtp server for X.com then you would set that as the domain name.

For mail to get to your box you would have the 'MX' (Mail exchanger) record set in the dns record for X.com to point to your IP address. So, even if the rest of X.com was elsewhere your box would still be part of the domain. You might have lines like this in the zone file :

X.com. IN MX 10 woodchuck.X.com.
woodchuck.X.com. IN A 172.16.16.1

What happens is when a remote user sends mail to joeuser@X.com the sending smtp server queries dns for the MX records and will then attempt to directly connect to the smtp server at the IP address thus resolved.

Hope this helps..