> > > You can't just call your router a "nameserver" to make it so any more > than you > > can call me a millionaire to make me financially comforted. > > > Thank you for the useful information, and for the reminder of the depths > of my ignorance. Perhaps you could help out even more by illuminating > the difference between what my router is doing when it assigns IP > addresses, and what a nameserver is? >
I'll take on this task. Definition of terms: router: thing that routes traffic. This is needed when sending traffic from one network (192.168.0.x) to another network (the Internet) thing that assigns IP addresses: DHCP server nameserver: thing that provides the service of telling you what the IP address is for a given hostname, and vice versa > > You may be able to configure the router (what is it anyway?) to always > assign > > thatthere the same IP address. In which case you could then add it to > > /etc/hosts, as Rich demontrated, and have things work. > > > It's a Linksys (mumble mumble)54G. I'll update this when I get upstairs. > The WRT54G may provide any or none of these services, depending on how it's configured. My understanding of the default configuration is that it provides routing and DHCP services, but not DNS (nameserver). > With the stability of home networks it is pretty, reasonably likely the IP > > address for thatthere will never change anyway. So you can determine > what the > > address is and add it to /etc/hosts. > > > > If you go that route figure out where to put a reminder for yourself so > that > > when it breaks you know what you did and why. > > > If I'm going to play those games I may as well just assign the desktop > with a fixed address. We live out in the boonies with enough power > outages that the network gets a complete power-down and power-up several > times a month in the winter; that would scramble the IP addresses each > time and I certainly don't want to try to chase after it. > > Going back a bit -- there's no way I can just ping by name? > Not automagically between linux hosts. Windows does this using some black magic voodoo called NetBIOS. With linux, you will have to either set up some DNS solution (there are several different paths for this) or enter them all into your hosts file. And all this discussion of modifying configuration files -- that happens > on the client side, _not_ the host side, right? > Depending on what you mean by client or host. In this case, the modification is generally expected to happen on the machine on which you want to accomplish something. -- > Tim Wescott > -wes _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
