Thanks. I have Posadis running now. The documentation I was using confused me regarding what the "listen" configuration was looking for - ie, interfaces to listen on - I thought it was about packet source.

Mercury runs on a machine on my local network with a fixed IP 192.168.0.50, and is configured to have the internet name issued to me by my ISP. From the internet, packets come in to my NAT router and port forwarding sends them to 192.168.0.50. No problems, and I think that's the normal way to do it.

I was initially unsure how to route packets from clients on the local network. The clients have the internet name of the mercury box, and so when I set them up I put an entry in the Windows hosts file to link it 192.168.0.50 - although I think I could have simply given the clients the IP. This also works, but I am not sure what is usual.

The problem is that I now have a smartphone and want to connect to my Mercury server, both through the phone network and locally through my wireless router. If I configure the mail client with the internet address of the server, I can connect locally but not through the internet. If I configure it with the local IP, the opposite applies.

My NAT is done on a single port ADSL modem router. This and my local clients are connected by a wireless router in bridge mode. With the phone client set up using the server's internet name, its log file shows it connects to the router, resolves the domain (to the public IP, I assume) and then (having no route to that IP) fails to connect. 

Is there some way I can link the internet name to the local IP, for local traffic?

Thanks

Chris

Yes, but you will need a local DNS server to supply the local IP to your phone.

This will also do away with the need to configure the hosts file on each client.

If your router does not support entering custom DNS entries (which it probably won't), you should set the DHCP server to supply a local macine as the DNS server, rather than itself or your ISP.

Of course you will also need to set up that local machine to be a DNS server. There are many lightweight options available if you search.

Thanks, dilberts. I've downloaded and installed Posadis, but am having trouble getting it to run. If I configure it to listen to the lan, I get a fatal error, "can not bind to socket"

If I omit the LAN from the configuration, it loads but nothing I've entered responds to a query.

I will keep trying

OK, Posadis is what I used as well (it was a while ago on a Win98 "server" [:)]).

I don't recall having any trouble with it, but I don't have my old config either.

Check for anything else running on UDP 53, and also that is what Posadis is set to use.

EDIT: Found my old posadisrc.txt, looks pretty basic, note the "Listen any" directive, does that work for you? You're not adding you LAN address in addition to this?

Thanks. I tried adding the LAN addresses, and get the error. Listen "any" doesn't get the error, but I assume it still fails to bind where it needs to, so doesn't work. I have checked that services like ICS are not running, and netstat doesn't show anything on 53. Must be something so I'll keep looking.

With Posadis running with 'listen any' can you query from the local machine on 127.0.0.1?

Does netstat show it running?

local firewall allow inbound on port 53?