On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 23:49, Kevin Brown wrote:
> > Something that's puzzling me about DHCP and DNS. On the individual
> > hosts, be they Linux, Windows, whatever, you have to specify a hostname.
> > If this system uses DHCP to get it's IP address, the DNS may or may not
> > resolve to the hostname that that specific system identifies itself
> > with. Is there a way to make sure that no matter what IP address the
> > DHCP server gives a computer, it's name will always be consistent?
> > 
> > Ex: let's say I want to FTP from one system to another. The server side
> > just got a new IP lease and I don't know what it is. Can I just FTP to
> > <systemname> and access the system I want? Or is this just not possible?
> > Should I instead just give permanent IP addresses to those systems that
> > will run servers?
> > 
> > I'm also wondering because in the Windows world, the box name is
> > consistent, and you can always access it through \\name\share. Granted,
> > this is SMB and not DNS, but still...
> 
> Windows does this with DDNS (dynamic DNS) under Active Directory.  You could 
> probably get all the systems to do this by setting up a DDNS server and have all 
> the machines register their hostname with it via scripts.
> 

Thanks for the info. I guess I'll stick to DHCP for any Windows systems
out there, and static IP's for all others :) Considering that my
personal, main system is Gentoo-based and my firewall is FreeBSD, I
guess that's not too much extra work! All I'd need to do is run samba on
my linux system as PDC. All my Windows systems in the network are WinXP,
so sharing between them should be relatively easy, even without DDNS...

Thanks again!