On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 06:25:44PM +0100, Keith Gibbons wrote:
I am currently setting up a Samba server using SuSE 7.1 I have set up the DHCP and it is working fine, all PC's on the network receive their IP addresses via the server - so far so good. I want to set up the named nameserver as well on my server and I am a little confused. I have set up the preliminary zone files and this is where I come unstuck. I the zone file for my domain e.g xyz.com.zone I am supposed to enter the ip addresses and the hostnames. - why? As I am using DHCP does this not mean that the ip addr (set dynamically by DHCP) could on the clients could possibly be different every time? This is where I begin to get confused. The same applies to the xyz.com.rev file for reverse lookups. How is it possible to have DHCP and the DNS files kept accurate? Maybe I am missing something here but it seems to be very strange.
The machines on my network use DHCP for easy mass configuration, but the important machines are always assigned the same IP address by the DHCP server. The dhcpd.conf file has entries for the MAC addresses for these boxes, along with a line that specifies a fixed address. In my case, the fixed address that is in the file isn't an IP address, but a hostname. The DHCP server then looks up this hostname on the DNS server and assigns the IP address that's returned. You could also set up a pool of addresses on the DHCP server, for example the addresses 192.168.0.20-192.168.0.25, and list these all in your DNS as the hostnames box-20, box-21, box-22, etc. This way, they'll still have resolvable hostnames, but not necessarily always the *same* hostname. If you really want to give your machines fixed hostnames, your best using the fixed-address option for DHCP rather than using other programs or scripts to update the DNS entries. Of course, you don't have to enter every IP address in the DNS zone files, but if you want to give them DNS entries then they'll need a name (be it a static name or a dynamic one) as the purpose of DNS is to translate between names and numbers... Bye, Chris -- __ _ -o)/ / (_)__ __ ____ __ Chris Reeves /\\ /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ICQ# 22219005 _\_v __/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\