Cannot connect to my Server across my network

Question

Hi
I have a Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server preinstalled.
At this stage, I need my server only to be available on the local network and I am not part of a larger organisation. We have run an informal network in the past through our wireless router but want to use the server within this network mainly for file and print sharing, calendar, contacts and wiki sharing.
So, the network is as follows:
Wireless router provides access to the outside world, and provides IP addresses as subnets to the other macs and PCs. All the machines can see each other currently and can share files (permission dependent of course).
I have setup the new server and it has been given an IP address by the router. When asked to provide a domain name, as we don't currently want to point our internet domain towards this server, I followed the suggestion in the Getting Started guide and entered myserver.private.
I have activated all services except mail and VPN as I don't intend to host my mail internally and I am not ready to use VPN just yet.
All the other machines can now see the server - its name shows on all the finders and explorers. However, when we attempt to connect to it, Finder reports Not Connected.
The admin user for the server is the same as my user on my iMac, but when I attempt to connect my user to the server from the iMac (via the Accounts dialog in System Preferences setting Login Options and connect to Network Account Server), I receive an error stating that the server name cannot resolve. The error number is 2200 - Could not resolve the address. I have tried putting the IP address of the server in as well as the name, but no joy.
What am I missing? What else do I need to do?
Thanks in anticipation. Used to support Unix servers machines in the early 90s. But can't remember!

Answer 1

Here's what worked for me. Sounds like my office is similar to yours.
By default, the router acquires DHCP onfo from the ISP, including the address of the ISP's DNS servers. By default, each workstation acquires DHCP info (including DNS addresses) from your Router. That means that by default, your workstations contact the ISP's DNS servers directly. Nothing is telling them about the existance of your server, and many of their functions won't see it and won't work properly.
You have a choice, you can manually configure each workstation to point to your server for their DNS, or you can manually configure the router to hand out your server's address for DNS.
I prefer the second option, since it requires zero configuration of the workstations, which also means that any time a new workstation comes into your office (laptops, iPhones, etc.) the system just works. Less deskside support burden for you. The workstations contact the router for their DHCP handshake, and are told by the router to contact your server for all DNS inquiries.
On the server, obviously, you need to make sure that DNS is working correctly. That includes, manually entering your ISPs DNS servers (or any other DNS server you trust, like OpenDNS, Google DNS, etc.) in the Server Admin DNS Settings as the lookup servers (these go in the confusingly named "Forwarder IP Addresses"). Entering multiple external internet DNS servers in this box is acceptable, so you have some "failover" abilities.
Also, on the server, in System Preferences, you should manually configure the DNS options to point to the server itself. That means that when any random process running on the server needs a DNS lookup, it will use the DNS server running on the server to resolve it.
The downside of this approach I have described above is that if your server is ever shutdown, none of the macs will "see" the internet. Their macs will go to your server for their DNS inquiries, and receive no response, and get strange errors (timeouts). It means taht if you ever have to do server maintenance, you'll probably have to do it on nights or weekends, or temporarily change your router's DNS settings to point to the outside world DNS servers while your own server is down, and then change the router back afterwards. My server uptime has been very good so far, and this hasn't been a problem at my office.