Matice, James, Johan and others Thanks for your time and effort last night - I went to bed before your replies came in. I think the best advice you gave me is to assign a fixed IP to the db (SuSE) server. That is what I will do. When I know more about alI this I'd like to restart this thread and ask you how I can build a magic Linux box with a pre-installed dbms, Windows, Mac and Linux application installers too; no screen, no keyboard and just a blue cable. Maybe a power cable :) A true magic machine. But not yet. You asked "why Firebird?" and my answer is that it is free, open source, cross platform (Mac, Win, Linux, *nix). I will never again use proprietary software to develop my applications. Doing so is a dead-end strategy. Much safer and more relaxing to rely on the collective intelligence of a community than the arbitrary decisions of CEOs who are driven by their shareholders instead of their customers. So that (only just) eliminates MySQL and I haven't looked at PostgreSQL. I will be looking with interest at a recently announced new rdbms written in pure Python. Thanks heaps Mike At 12:20 am 12/12/2004, Johan Nielsen wrote:

Can't your router assign IP's based on MAC-adress ??

At 04:32 am 12/12/2004, matice@nic.fi wrote:

Hello, its always a good practice to have servers set with fixed static IP addresses, and this includes printers and other common resources that are shared across the network regardless of what type of realm is being used (nis, nt domain, or netware), if for some reason you want the servers, printers and whatever obtain their IP address through DHCP, you can still do that by configuring your dhcp deamon (service) to reserve particular IP addresses for given mac address, it is quiet simple and all you have to do is just check the examples in the manuals and use them.

now in every network it is good to have only 1 dhcp server, if you have 2 and each having a different configuration, you start running into troubles and the network client pcs will start to cough and get sick, and that wouldnt be nice especially during the comming xmass holidays.

a simple clean setup in this case would be as the following:

1- do not run DNS or dhcp on your novell (ofcourse you will have to run the basic DNS so that the directory would work) 2- do not use your router as DHCP server, the reason for that is if it goes down for some reason well so will all the DHCP dependent pcs in the network.

as for the installation figure well, NOVELL SEVER - DIRECTORY services - file and printing services - misc services (possibly intranet or whatever you may have there) - DNS service, since you have a novell system in your network, you are obliged to use the DNS from your novell system, (if you are not performing any sort of directory based fine grained network services, you do not need to use the DHCP service there, just use the one on the linux system)

SuSE 9.1 server - Firebird DBMS (dunno why you want to use that one, there are many other options, mysql/postgress, etc) - DHCPd service (configure it to assign static IP address to the machines that require static ip addresses (for whatever reason)

Router - do not run any services on it, just keep it simple and let it route and provide network statistics and perform the network security (firewall if it has that feature)

Network printer - configure it with a static ip or to get a static ip from DHCP

network PC clients - configure to get IP, DNS, gateway configurations

DHCP service should provide the following

IP ADDRESS POOL NETWORK MASK NETWORK GATEWAY POSSIBLY WINS SERVICE (pointing to novell) DNS (pointing to NOVELL)

configure the DNS on your novell to point to your network services whereever they may be including printers.

i might have mentioned half the things i wanted to say as i am writting this in between things :)

regards Matice

...

Dear list I want to use 9.1 SuSE with Firebird as a database server in a Novell 5.0 LAN with mixed Win98 and WinXP workstations. The DHCP derived addresses for all machines (except maybe the file server) come from the DSL router. My question is ... 1 Is it possible to name the machine and use the name instead of an IP address for the dbms and let the router assign addresses as it sees fit. If so, how do I do that? 2 If no, should I assign a fixed IP address forever? (don't know how to do that) The only way I know what the IP address happens to be is to restart and watch closely the screen flies by as it gets assigned. The latest one happens to be 192.168.0.11. I can ping it OK. Thanks for any advice Mike

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