On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, steve wrote: s> The SuSE documentation says that 'it makes absolute sense to use a s> nameserver if you have squid running' OWTTE, so I went through the s> chore of writing a nameserver according to the bind documentation.and s> the helios earth example in the SuSE manual a few weeks ago for our s> small school 22 computer lan with samba and a mix of w98 and 7.3 boxes. s> Before that we just put the client names in /etc/hosts. I can see no s> advantage in having spent so much time in doing so. What are the s> advantages? s> Well, I can explain the advantage of usign a nameserver, but how it relates to Squid, I don't know as I havn't messed with Squid. Anyway, heres the advantage as I see it. Without a nameserver, in order for each workstation to correctly resolv another workstations IP-Address, FQDN & Hostname you would have to add the IP-Address, FQDN & Hostname of every workstation on your LAN to the /etc/hosts file of every other workstation on the LAN. With a nameserver, you simply point the workstation to your nameserver, the workstation, when needing to resolv another workstations IP-Address, FQDN & Hostname would then simply query your nameserver, which takes care of resolving, and relays it back to the initiating workstation. Now, let's say you add another computer some time down the road. In the first scenario, you would have to add the IP-Address, FQDN & Hostname of all other workstations to this new workstations /etc/hosts file in order for it to correctly resolv. In the second scenario, you would only have to add the new workstation to the nameservers zone files so that every other workstation can resolv it. s> Thanks, Steve. s> s> -- S.Toms - smotrs at mindspring.com - www.mindspring.com/~smotrs SuSE Linux v7.3+ - Kernel 2.4.10-4GB