John Andersen wrote:
On Sunday 01 May 2005 01:14 pm, James Knott wrote:
That said, the device connected to the ISP, gets it's name from the ISP.
You should always disable this feature in your dhcpc config. All the hardware routers I am aware of allow you suppress this behaviour.
This is neccessary, if you want to access your system remotely, using the host name, as assigned by the ISP.
And why would you want to do that? Have you never heard of dynamic dns?
With something line dyndns.org , you can find your computer from anywhere even if you have a dynamically assigned IP. In the last 8 years I've saved over 6 thousand dollars by NOT paying my ISP for a dynamic IP on several boxes that I need to manage remotely. Its essential to never allow my ISP to change my host name. Screws up MTAs and all sorts of things.
As I mentioned, I have a static host name, from my ISP, based on the MACs. Even if my IP changes (a rare occurance), the host name never does, unless I make a hardware change. As a result, I have no need of dyndns.org. I simply rely on my ISPs DNS, when I want to connect to my home system. The only downside, is that the assigned host name is long and hard to remember. So, I've added "home" to my hosts file, with the current address, so that if I'm typing a command, I can use that name. My vpn is configured to use the fully qualified name from my ISP's DNS. I only use my vpn or ssh to access my system remotely.