poiting domain to box behind gateway

Hello there,

Preface:
I'm complitely new to dns and I started by reading Oreilly's DNS&Bind, which seems to be a good book to start with. So sorry if I'm missing some vital info in my post - please tell me if I am.

At home I have 3 boxes - gateway with win2k pro, one on xp, and box running freebsd4.5. I registered domain with godaddy.com, and 'm using everydns.net for dns records. I run their clients on winxp and freebsd, but I cannot make domain (digitalstate.net) point on either one. Somehow, I could before though (if you care, see attachment with description), and the only thing that changed from then is I disabled port forwarding on 2k gateway. Even when I turned them back on I still cannot access my lan boxes. IIRC, DNS works with MAC addresses, and if my memory serves well, in osi model MAC addressing is below ports, so I do not understand how turning off port forwarding could prevent domain from reaching server behind gateway.

I guess in two words my question is, if I have win2k as my gateway, and I want have domain name pointing on my freebsd box, do I need to have port forwarding on? And is there anything else I need to do on my gateway, because right now domain points on gateway (I run ftp server there and I can access it), even though I ran client from freebsd box.

P.S. I waited ~2-3 days before updating dns info

Ok, simplest error of all - I do not have port forwarding on lan nic, therefore my local requests did not get transfered to freebsd box. It works when I use proxy server.

Although, I still want to know if I have to have port forwarding to point domain on box behind gateway, because by my math ports shouldn't matter.

>> do I need to have port forwarding on?

Yes, both UDP and TCP on port 53 for BIND running on FreeBSD.

Of course, I don't know anything about everydns. But like I mentioned dozen times, BIND integrates a caching DNS resolver and a DNS server into one package, making people say "DNS server" when they are really talking about a "DNS resolver". When running cache-only you don't need to enable port forwarding on win2k.

>> I run their clients on winxp and freebsd

This is the problem because your win2k box is unable distinguish the packet as if it's directing for itself, not to mention when an udp 53 inbound is received your win2k has no way of forwarding that to two boxes.
That said, you can't run that simultaneously on winxp and freebsd, so win2k has a dedicated internal host that it knows to forward DNS packet to.

thanks freebsd for reply, and I meant I ran clinets on different boxes and different time to be sure it is not server config problem, not simultaneously.