local domain names

[idover]

i'm currently filling in as the network admin until we can replace the guy that just disappeared. i'm a programmer, but am familiar with a good bit of networking. i work for a company where technical literacy is about as common as a seven legged monkey. it's difficult to explain to them why they have to type in a certain IP address to reach our websites, rather than the domain name. and i'm faced daily with this. so my thoughts leaned towards installing an internal dns server for those sites. however, i've never dealt with dns personally, much less set up a server. from my understanding, our router is the reason that we have to use ip addresses rather than domain names in order to reach those sites that exist on our network, which are all on the same side of the router - local. is a local dns server the solution for this, or is this a configuration with the router? how difficult is this to accomplish, and what do i need to do? resources would be great, i've had no luck even getting bind to start on an NT4 machine. thanks in advance!

quick example:

http://10.0.0.5

is the only address that we can use in the office to reach

http://www.ourdomain.com.

ike!

 

[mcconmw]

I can't help much with the DNS, but can you not type in http:\\servername and get the website. Also, have you considered supplying them with shortcuts that have a path similar to:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE" 10.1.1.1

This way they could just double click the icon.

 

[idover]

thanks!... i've set up shortcuts for some of the sites, but for others, this will not work. when these sites were designed, all of the image references use the complete domain name. therefore, they don't show up on the internal network, and it's the same with a good bit of links. changing them to work internally would break them for the outside world, so that's not a good idea. and i can't go through each page/directory and make these changes in multiple sites - just not enough time. as for using the server name, it still presents the same problems as telling these people an ip address. so i figured that i could set up a dns server that contains only the records for the sites that we host here, and tell all clients to use that dns server first to resolve these local addresses. i'm assuming that records can point to any ip address, such as

http://www.alocaldomain.com

-> 10.0.0.6. is this possible?

if anyone here in my office asks me again today about this, i'm jumping out the window...

thanks,
ike!