nameserver problems

[Rebecca Dridan <rdrid@ormond.unimelb.edu.au>]

Hi all,

I'm having some problems with the nameserver on a webserver I am setting up at
a company I work for. I'm running bind from potato, and the machines on the
internal network can use my server as a name server, no problems, but when I
try and set my machine up at home to query this server to test it, I get
connection timed out, no servers found.

I can connect using ssh to the machine from outside, when I nmap it, it says
port 53 is open and there is nothing in my firewall logs to say anything is
getting blocked.  My ISP assure me that they are not blocking port 53.

I'd like to be sure the nameserver is working before I get all our domains
redelegated.  Can anyone tell me if a nameserver won't work if it is not being
pointed to by something outside?  It has it's own static IP, but I'm not sure
is a nameserver needs to be "declared" or registered it some way.

Other than that, can anyone tell me how to track down the problem?  I can't
use traceroute as I normally would because there is no problem seeing and
connecting to the machine normally and I can't find any helpful options to dig
or nslookup.

Thanks,

Bec