Do I have to locally host my DNS Server to have iCal Services work?

Question

I have my registrar handling my DNS hosting and have set up an A record for what I'm putting into my "Host Name" field in the iCal Service setting. Is this correct? The error dialog that pops up is:
"No virtual host found for iCal service
More information about configuring the iCal Service and connecting this server to a directory server can be found in the Help menu."
The Help menu is useless. Where do I set up the "virtual host"? The only other place I've been setting up virtual hosts is in the Mail service. Do they overlap?
Oh, and when I try to enable calendaring in WGW, the check doesn't stay enabled. Any thoughts there?

Answer 1

Hi
A hostname or Fully Qualified Domain Name or FQDN (which I'm guessing you have heard of before?) generally looks something like this:
myservername,mydomain.com
You could substitute myservername for something simple like server or ns1 or xserve or osxserver. It can be anything you like. Clearly mydomain is whatever domain name you chose or have. This could be your real world domain or if you are only concerned with providing an internal service then a fictitious one will do. The .com bit can be anything you like. It does not have to be a real world top level domain (TLD). It too can be fictitious. Lots of people use .internal, .lan, .private even .earth or the town or city name of your location. You can even use .local if you like although I would steer clear of this as it can cause problems for the unwary.
Why give yourself problems when there is no need to? The point is if you use something fictitious it just has to look like a real world domain. As you can see if you decided that you only want this to be a private server behind NAT/Firewall then your hostname could look something like this:
server.newyork.here
I'm using New York as an example. You can also regard the above as the fqdn of your server. In the DNS Service you can add CNAMES or Aliases for specific services you are interested in. Something like intranet or www for the Web Service and possibly ical or cal or calendar for the iCal Service. Your server would then resolve its IP Address to all of those names in addition to its server name. Something like this:
intranet.newyork.here
calendar.newyork.here
And so on. You can 'push' this information out to your client computers using the Server's DHCP Service. Client computers would then be using the Server to resolve their DNS as well. If all of their services are coming from the server then that would make logical sense. At the moment iCal works best if client computers are bound to the Open Directory Master (your server) and are using it for their DNS. Proper working of Open Directory absolutely requires internal DNS running somewhere. Either on the server itself or on another server elsewhere.
I'm not an expert by any means and this is all simply put but you should be getting an idea of what is required by now?
I posted something some time ago that 'walks' through how to set up from scratch your server, DNS and OD simply and concisely. If you are at an early stage or purely testing then perhaps you can give it a go and see if it works for you?
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7650358&#7650358
Tony