On Mon, 2003-06-16 at 12:31, Ronald J. Hall wrote:
> On Monday 16 June 2003 10:12 am, Derek Jennings wrote:
> 
> > We were talking about Dhcp.  Samba will resolve NETBIOS names for you which
> > is entirely a different thing.
> > By putting the names/adrresses in /etc/hosts you are using static
> > addressing.
> >
> > derek
> 
> So was I.  I guess I don't understand the mechanics too well but what I did 
> was set DHCP to auto assign IP addressess to my 3 comps (via the Mandrake 
> Wizard). It gave them:
> 
> 192.168.0.100
> 192.168.0.101
> 192.168.0.102
> 
> So...then I took these numbers assigned by DHCP and put them into /etc/hosts 
> so that we could ping each other by alias instead of having to type in the 
> full quad number.
> 
> Did I do a "no-no"? :-)

Technically......Yes. The only reason it is working is that your router
has not ended any leases. With routers that have DHCP capability, I
believe you can tell all of them (you can with Linksys and D-Link) to
never terminate a lease. In essence, you have statically assigned
addresses, with one nice catch. This catch refers to Derek's question
about how can DHCP alone resolve internal names. Because the router it
providing DHCP, it also keeps a table of who has what. When a machine
pings an IP, it broadcasting it over the whole network to every device.
I believe the DHCP router accepts this request, looks up the assignment
in its table and sends back the information in the form of another
broadcast. Anyway, if your router is set to never release a lease, you
don't need the hosts files setup as you do. Id the leases change, you
will some day be in name-resolution hell.

On a M$ NT server, WINS provides the local names resolution. I believe
BIND does that in Linux. The Samba server has it's own version of a WINS
and uses it. Win 9.x clients can actually derive DNS through DHCP, but I
don't believe they can get local resolution.

> 
> It all seems to work really well. We all have broadband connections, we can 
> all ping each other by hostname, and games that never would find each other 
> before now do...

T


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