There are many PROS/CONS regarding hassles and benefits of DNS/DHCP services for a small network. - I've been reading up and playing around myself with this topic now for several months. Here is my personal conclusion: The hosts config file solution is easy to understand and can be copied to all participating machines within a local network. - But it only can provide name resolution for that LAN, nothing more. - And it quickly becomes cumbersome, when workstations have multi-os-boot configurations. Or even worst, booting up Live-CD systems always needs manual configuration. Looking at a DNS/DHCP combination (DDC) instead, one achieves dynamic configuration for all workstations including those with heterogeneous OS environments and temporary Live-CD systems. This is not just a simple mapping between machine names & aliases with their associated IP addresses, but it also serves to dynamically configure DNS, MAIL or GATEWAY addresses for the entire LAN. Now DHCP, can provide dynamic or static IPs to a workstation (WS). Dynamic IPs get temporarily assigned to a WS. But unless the associated machine name is dynamically updated with the DNS server (kept in sync), a direct access from one WS to another by means such as SSH is cumbersome. By telling the DHCP server to map a fixed IP address to the unique MAC-address of a network interface card (NIC) , a WS is allways assigned the same machine name and IP address at boot time. That is even true for Live-CDs. When needed, I'm more than happy to send you my current configuration files. Regards, Rainer On Wednesday 09 June 2004 16:40, Richard Mixon (qwest) wrote:
I am a noobie when it comes to configuring DNS - some guidance is appreciated.
I am reading the DNS info in the 9.1 administration guide. It talks about setting up zone files where one ends up hardcoding the IP addresses for each hostname on the network. That seems to defeat the purpose of DHCP though. I'm currently using a Linksys firewall as a DHCP server for my Windows clients.
I am setting up a SuSE Pro 9.1 server that will serve two main purposes: - Samba file and print sharing; - CVS source code server.
We currently only have six users. I would really like to get rid of the host files that I have been using on each server and workstation (servers Linus, workstations Windows 2000/XP). I think I need to setup a caching DNS server, plus 1 zone that identifies my local network servers and workstations.
But as I said above, that seems like it defeats the purpose of DHCP. What am I missing.
Thank you - Richard