David C. Rankin wrote:

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Marc Chamberlin wrote: <snip>

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Kai - to answer your questions, my network consists mostly of laptops that come and go and some desktops. All are dual booted to either Windoz or Linux, users choice. Our DHCP server does know their names and does assign a fixed static internal network address to each one. So that simplifies the problem a lot. Also we have a static file system structure that must be set up on each system so we can work with that.

<snip>

Marc,

An even easier way for the dual-boot laptop issue, (if your users are smart enough to maintain the same hostname in Linux and windows) is to configure dhcpd.conf like:

subnet 192.168.6.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { option domain-name "3111skyline.com"; ddns-domainname "3111skyline.com"; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; range dynamic-bootp 192.168.6.110 192.168.6.150; default-lease-time 28800; max-lease-time 172800; zone 3111skyline.com. {primary 127.0.0.1; key DHCP_UPDATER; } zone 6.168.192.in-addr.arpa. { primary 127.0.0.1; key DHCP_UPDATER; } # # We want P35a to appear at the same fixed address regardless of # which OS is booted to prevent multiple dhcp leases belonging to the # same hardware address # host P35a.3111skyline.com { hardware ethernet 00:26:f5:17:2d:83; fixed-address 192.168.6.101; }

That way no matter which OS they use, the IP dhcpd hands out is always the same for the same hostname/mac address of any given box.

Thanks David for the DHCP suggestion, I have been fooling around with it and there is a wrinkle in our network environment that I am not finding a solution for when using your approach to assign a single fixed address to a laptop. We have both a wired and a wireless network and laptops do change the way they are connecting to the network from time to time. This means that a particular laptop could be using one of two different hardware MAC addresses and apparently the DHCP server (the one that comes with SuSE which we use on our main server) will not allow me to assign the same fixed IP address to two different MAC addresses?? I can understand if that is just the way it is, even seems logical since the DHCP server may not have a means to "know" that two different MAC addresses actually belong to the same laptop.. I have tried some variations on your theme but so far no joy getting the DHCP server to assign the same IP address to two different MAC addresses...

I can work around this, just have to make my scripts a bit smarter is all... (All this is making me appreciate the days when someone else was the sys admin, and not me... but that was when I worked for a great big corporation that could afford em!)

Marc...

P.S. Sorry David I did not mean to reply to your personal address, durn Thunderbird email client won't set the reply to properly for the opensuse mail list... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org