Making host visible

[Ron Hauptfleisch]

I am not a newbie but I am not a sysadmin either. My problem is this:

I have a small home lan. I access the internet via an SMC barricade
cable router. On the lan I have one linux desktop (Redhat 8), a
Windows XP machine (my wife's) and my laptop (dual boot XP/Redhat 8).

The cable router provides dhcp. The desktop has a static IP, but the
Windows XP machine and my desktop both get their IP via dhcp. The
problem is this. I am unable to access my machines (especially the
laptop) via hostname. I can add the desktop to /etc/hosts since it
is static, but I can't do that for the laptop, because I intend to
use it on other access points. I can pretty much handle things with
the aid of How-to's, but I really don't what needs to be done.

Do I need to set up dns on my home lan? My cable router is
my nameserver and I have no domain name on my lan.

I would greatly appreciate it if someone could point me in the
right direction.

thanks.

--ron

[Andrew Ho]

Hi,
I'm not sure I understand your problem correctly, but it sounds to me
as though what you need to do is get samba configured - I might be
wrong, because I don't entirely understand what it is you're trying to
do. If you're trying to view by hostname the other machines, then
either put them in /etc/hosts or set up samba.
hth,
andy

[Edgar Giese]

Hi Ron,

Ron Hauptfleisch schrieb:

> I am not a newbie but I am not a sysadmin either. My problem is this:
>
> I have a small home lan. I access the internet via an SMC barricade
> cable router. On the lan I have one linux desktop (Redhat 8), a
> Windows XP machine (my wife's) and my laptop (dual boot XP/Redhat 8).
>
> The cable router provides dhcp. The desktop has a static IP, but the
> Windows XP machine and my desktop both get their IP via dhcp. The
> problem is this. I am unable to access my machines (especially the
> laptop) via hostname. I can add the desktop to /etc/hosts since it
> is static, but I can't do that for the laptop, because I intend to
> use it on other access points. I can pretty much handle things with
> the aid of How-to's, but I really don't what needs to be done.
>
> Do I need to set up dns on my home lan? My cable router is
> my nameserver and I have no domain name on my lan.

Yes! You need DDNS. The DHCP-Server should add the entries to the
DNS-Server. I don't know, if the cable router provide this. If
not, perhaps you can run DNS and DHCP on your Linux-Box. You need
Bind 9 and ISC dhcpd.
Look at:

http://home.t-online.de/home/hubertus.sandmann/

for more information. Excuse me! It's german.

[Ken Kauffman]

"Ron Hauptfleisch" <ho...@foobox.net> wrote in message
news:pan.2003.07.02....@foobox.net...

Setup SAMBA as the primary WINS server on your internal network. It will
"poll" the machines for their Windows names and manage the list. You will
then be able to ping them by name. Name.domain pinging will not occur. All
machines should be identified with the same workgroup for ease.

Relevant entries for smb.conf in the global section:

wins support = true
local master = yes
preferred master = yes
domain master = yes
workgroup = MyWorkGroupName
netbios name = HostnameOfMyServer
oslevel=64

ken k