On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 09:06:38 -0500, Steven T. Hatton said: | On Tuesday 20 February 2001 09:32, Koos Pol wrote: | > On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 09:44:46 +0100, Jeroen Verstegen said: | [snip to please the grump with the flu] | > You have to define for yourself what "small" is, but for small networks | > I personally would use /etc/hosts and keep them syn'ed (Run a cronjob | > on every machine to get the latest version from the 'master') | > Setting up additional services for such an network (DNS, dhcp) can be a | > lot of fun to discover how things work in the real world, but it's | > usefulness for small network is very limited. And these additional | > services don't live off air alone. They do need to be maintained. Ever | > found yourself in a DNS misconfig swamp? I was. And you don't want to | > be as well :-) | > | > My arbitrary definition for small could be <15 | > | > Cheers, | Koos, | | I just went through the 'joy of DNS' when I applied a patch to my existing | DNS. It is a lot of work to get a good grasp of how this stuff works. I | have been thinking about asking the other folks here what they believe a | "core" home net might entail. The end product of such a discussion might be | a little howto for home nets with a cookie-cutter collection of configuration | files. [big snip] | What I'd like to see is a way of integrating MS-SAM, DNS, BIND, NIS, LDAP, | and applicaions such as apache in such a way that I can plug in a box and | either configure it from a centeralized location, or have it dynamically | configured using the least amount of information possible as a bootstrap. I | believe this is a bit of a reach as a short term goal, but perhaps the | syncronization of BIND, NIS, and DHCP is a reasonable goal. | | It would be nice to share config file examples on the list. The downside to | this is that by posting to the net we expose ourselves to computer vandals, | and other manner of criminals who would try to break into our shsytems. | | Any thoughts? | | Steve If you want to go this road, my first impression is that you need to let go a lot of the default Linux distribution properties. If you need to configure similar boxes in a standard way my first (upfront) reaction would be to install and configure a machine to it's minimum and compile the common packages from sources with a tuned config.cache and tuned configuration files. You also need to integrate them in your bootup/shutdown sequence. Clearly you are throwing away a lot of SuSE's "auto install" features. Maybe you can rebuild SuSE's rpm's and change them to your own specifications? In any case, it's a very long walk to finish. -- ---------------------------------------------------- Koos Pol T: +31 20 3116122 Systems Administrator F: +31 20 3116200 Compuware Europe B.V. E: koos_pol@nl.compuware.com Amsterdam PGP public key available