[FX.php List] Somewhat [Off Topic] How to tell your local computers which is a domain-named server

[Troy Meyers]

I'm asking here because I bet someone here knows. Apologies in advance.

For the past few years we had an IDSL connection with an Efficient Networks 5871 IDSL "modem" (router) provided through Speakeasy. It was better than dialup at 144Kbps upload and download, but not what you could call fast.

Just recently our local phone company Embarq put new hardware in our area so that we can get real ADSL. We signed up and it's better, though not super-fast because we are still in a remote rural area. The new ADSL "modem" is a ZyXEL 660 series.

Speakeasy hosted the images for our site under the domain name www.troymeyers.com, but for a special domain name, lab.troymeyers.com, they would direct Internet queries to our location through the static IP address of or IDSL router, which, using NAT, would send Port 80 queries to the FMSA-running Mac mini. That's where the HTML content of our pages comes from.

In the past, from in-house computers, if we used the domain name lab.troymeyers.com, by some magic, either provided by the IDSL router or Speakeasy, the FMSA machine was accessed properly. It's unclear to me if the queries actually went out the IDSL router and came back, or if the IDSL router, due to its NAT settings, knew that lab.troymeyers.com port 80 stuff (and others) should be aimed at the local IP address of the FMSA machine.

When we switched to the Embarq ADSL line and the ADSL modem, we kept Speakeasy as our web host, and just had them set their DNS server to aim lab.troymeyers.com queries to our new static Embarq ADSL IP address. This is working just fine for off-site users, no one noticed the change other than a few who commented that things had sped up.

In-house, though, if we use a URL (or a link in our pages) that contains "lab.troymeyers.com" it can no longer be resolved. It's possible I haven't got the right firewall and NAT setting in the new ADSL "modem" but I can't see where it's wrong. Instead I get this error message in the browser:

     Object Not Found

     The requested URL '/whatever/whatever.htm' was not found
     on the RomPager Advanced server.

I don't know what the RomPager Advanced Server is... maybe it's Embarq's?

In any case this is a nuisance when a user reports a URL that has a problem. I can't use the one they supply directly. I have to edit the lab.troymeyers.com part out and stick in the FMSA machine's local IP address. OR, I can fire up AOL and use their browser (which doesn't work like a normal one, AOL get the pages then sends them on) to see what the user is seeing, but it's a bad browser (for example you can't even View Frame Source).

A long time ago when we actually hosted our pages through DIALUP we had a similar problem, but it was solved by creating a "Hosts" file under MacOS 9.x and adding it via the TCP/IP control panel. The "Hosts" file was (I guess) just an A record that associated "lab.troymeyers.com" with the local IP address of the machine....

But I can't find a way to do this with MacOS X. All machines here are either 10.3.9 or 10.4.9.

Is there a way to specify "Hosts" in MacOS X, or does anyone know the trick that makes the ADSL router know better?

Thank you.

-Troy