Michael S. Dunsavage said the following on 07/12/2011 08:48 AM:
I have DHCP running on my linux server, and it gives out ips. I would like to access all my computers in my network by hostname....but that doesn't seem to work unless I put the IP and host in /etc/hosts..
How can I do this? My DHCP server is my router.
(You seem to contradict yourself: Is the DHCP server on the router or the linux server?) On the face of it, it sounds like you need a (local) DNS server. HOWEVER: I'm guessing since your description is sparse and you seem concerned about DHCP - which is not about name <-> IP address mapping but about IP address assignment. On my HOME LAN I have both DHCP and DNS. It is possible for DHCP to supply information to DNS, but that isn't a setup for beginners and there's no way I can be sure *YOUR* router's DHCP capability can do that. So what I'd suggest is this: EITHER Don't use DHCP. Use static addressing for all devices on your LAN. OR Do what pretty much amount to the same thing. My laptop gets it address via DHCP but the DHCP server is set up to supply the same IP address to the laptop every time, as determined by the MAC address of the laptop's Ethernet card. As far as I have seen even the cheapest LinkSys wifi routers for home use have that capability You can then tie down the name name <-> IP address mapping as if you were using static addressing. However if I take my laptop elsewhere, it is still using DHCP and in another setting it will get the IP address from that context. Hopefully whoever set up the DHCP server also set it up to hand out suitable routing and DNS information as well :-) I get the best of both worlds :-) There are excellent books on setting up DNS and DHCP from O'Reilly. Sidebar: although my routers can support DHCP I don't use that capability. I have a DHCP as well as a DNS server on my otherwise underutilized mail server on my home LAN. No, they are not running in virtual machines, they are running Chrooted, which is a LOT more efficient. Even so, the machine has a peak load average the never seems to exceed 0.5 (compared to my dual core plus lots of memory laptop which often exceeds 5.0). The server is and old Dell, single core 1GHz Celeron. The server also runs NFS and SAMBA for other machines on the net. It handles all this quite reliably and with less problems than I see friends who try to do the same with Windows and/or Virtual machines. No doubt experience has something to do with it, but lets face it, these are all old, and except for SAMBA, *NIX applications that have been around since before Windows. Many of them are "the backbone of the Internet" and were before Bill Gates discovered IP networking. Its not as if they are unchanged, they have 'grown up'. But they seem remarkably easy to deploy under Linux even without the Windows-style GUIs. -- "Ahhh. A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself." - Peter da Silva -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org