personal website on friends linode account.

Well if your friend gave you access to his linode manager account or a sub account then you can add DNS records there. If not then it's probably easier using your registrars name servers and pointing A records to your friend's linode's ip. Either way name servers are set with your domain registrar

It's probably a good idea to ask your friend. There's probably thousands of ways to set up a web hosting environment, and that will be much, much safer than guessing how it might be set up.

Thanks for the quick replies. OBS, thats probably how I'm needing to do it. I'm used to those free web hosts and can just point my domain name to their name servers (i.e. ns1.webhostingsite.com) The only thing with these free host are lack of ssh and limited ways I can use their servers. (i.e. no irc chat, no forums, things like that.) On my buddies linode server. I can run chatroom and host phpbb system. I'm just researching how I can point my domain name to a the linode name server and route that to my home directory. (if thats even possible.) I just don't want to go mucking around with his /var/www directory. How would website request to a home directory. Here is how I have my tree setup currenttly. /home/myusername/www/index.php Would it be possible to have this as a working web directory with .htaccess? Thanks again for the quick replays and help with this research. My only priority is not knocking the whole setup offline and disrupting service to the buddies clients.

Pointing a domain to a website is done using DNS that's the name server bit, pointing a website to a directory is done on the server itself using the web server software ask your friend to do that as hoopycat stated the server could be setup in many different ways any advise we give would be guessing and could break stuff.