I'm trying to set up my server (running Ubuntu server 8.04) on my university network so that I can access it from anywhere on campus. Last year I had it plugged into my router and set my router's domain like network.myschool.edu and hostname to dlh. This allowed me to access the router using dlh.network.myschool.edu, and I just used port-forwarding to access the server.
Now I'm just plugging the server in sans router and I'm trying to emulate the same setup. I have Avahi installed and I've tried setting my /etc/hostname to both dlh and dlh.network.myschool.edu. It doesn't seem to be working though when I try to ping from another computer.
Honestly though, I don't understand the whole domain/hostname thing very well and I'm not sure how this is done properly.