Issues with Multisite on Linux Server

Hey!

First, thanks in advance to anyone who takes time to help me out. Without folks like yourself, this community wouldn’t be so excellent!

I run a wordpress site at http://www.eventsatchestnuthillcollege.com. It’s currently hosted on a Windows Server, and I’d like to move it to a Linux server for the pretty permalinks and subdomains (i.e. sites.chc.edu/events or events.chc.edu [chc.edu is the other site I run, which is the college’s website]).

I installed WordPress on the Linux server and then converted it to Multisite (because eventually we’ll be hosting more sites there), but only managed to set it up using sub-directories because currently, the sites address is at an IP, not a .edu or .com. I know i need to change wp-config.php, as well as files in the database to point to the correct domain.

The issue is that I haven’t used Linux in years (currently using Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal), and after setting up a LAMP server, DNS through Bind9, and PHPMyAdmin, for the life of me, I’m not sure how to get the server to point to the correct domain (events.chc.edu). Even if I input events.chc.edu in the wp-config file (and everywhere else it needs to go), it’d only be accessible on our local network. I’ve pointed DNS to our nameservers! What settings do I have to change or update in Linux to make the domain visible to the world?

Also, whenever I create content within the site (I’m just copy-pasting the code from the site on the windows server, as the site isn’t very large, just 8 pages.), the pages show up in the dashboard, but the pages never get created on the server, so whenever I attempt to view the page using the menu of the site, I get a message saying the content wasn’t found on the server.

The Server’s IP is 10.21.17.51, and the site is currently running at 10.21.17.51/wordpress. Let’s say I tried to visit the “contact” page of my site, the link in the menu points to 10.21.17.51/wordpress/contact. But there’s nothing there! I can place a test “contact.php” file in /var/www/wordpress/, and then when I try 10.21.17.51/wordpress/contact, the page loads, but it’s blank (I assume it wouldn’t be if I actually coded the file to display something.)

I know these are two different issues, and I’m sure they’re complex, so again, I truly appreciate any and all help!

Edit: Do I need to turn “HostnameLookups” on in apache2.conf?