[Wolves] Domain names

[Wayne Morris]

Hi,

I have a domain name hosted by an ISP, who forwards to my cable connection.

Here I have a smoothwall, a webserver, a Laptop, and two windows pc's.

The webserver works ok, but something cropped up showin me that I don't 
really understand hostnames, domain names etc.

I was trying to set prefixes to my domain names so that

webserver.machx.co.uk would be webserver
laptop.machx.co.uk would be laptop etc

The reason for wanting prefixes is that apache seems to need the hostname to 
be a real domain name otherwise the mail bounces, and I want to run test 
pages on my laptop, before copying them across to the webserver.

On changing the laptop suffix using 'neat' this gave me two probs:
1) Although I can email directly regardless of hostname, for apache to send 
email (for phpnuke passwords etc), the hostname must be a valid domain eg 
machx.co.uk works, but laptop.machx.co.uk doesn't.
I guess this is to do with dns, laptop.machx.co.uk doesn't exist as far as 
the outside world is concerned and my isp will bounce it ?
So professional dns management would be the answer?
2) Although I can change hostname in 'neat', the change only occurs as far as 
apache is concerned if I use "hostname machx.co.uk"

I'm really confused, anyone know a really good tutorial on this?

Wayne