WordPress MU

I am planning to implement Wordpress MU on a windows XP server with Xampp. I am planning to test it on a local network before I actually put it live. I designed the blog and everything is ready to go now.

I did the localhost.localdomain in the Windows hosts file and I am not using virtual host (just subdirectories). Now, the network ip of all devices in my network start from 10.106.x.x ... now when I enter localhost.localdomain from the PC where the wordpress is and where the Xampp is loaded, everything words fine. It works fine even when I enter the IP address in that computer. However, if I try to access the blog from another computer by entering the IP address of the web server, the url changes from the IP to http://localhost.localdomain, but the browser shows a 404 error.

My WP files are inside XAMPP/htdocs ... now what baffles me is that, if i create a temporary html that says "Hello World" and place it in the same folder where the Wp files are, and the use another computer to put in the IP Address of the Server/that filename.html, it runs fine.

I do not understand why just the blog is not accessible from other computers in the network. Can anyone please give me some insight on this?

Because they don't know about localhost.localdomain and WPMU uses hostname based URLS rather than IP address based.

If you want to access the site from other PCs on your network then you need to edit the hosts file on each PC and add localhost.localdomain to it.

Thanks Steve. I have a couple more questions regarding that. Isn't editing the hosts file of all the computers too difficult? Isn't there any other way? And what if I want to make that computer a webserver that is accessible to everyone publicly (even outside the local network?) Sorry, I am more into PHP, but I dont have the network side knowledge ... if you could answer my questions, or maybe forward me to some good article related to making webservers live, it would be great! Thank you in advance!

Yes it is too hard. The obvious answer is to get a proper domain for it and then set up your LAN DNS server to deliver the IP address of your local server as the answer for than domain. Then if you want to make it accessible to external users then its just a matter of setting up the External DNS records and adjusting your firewall.