hostname and dhcp question

[Justin Willmert]

Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-06-30 at 13:38 +0800, Deepak Shrestha wrote:
>   
>> I have fedora core 5 installed in one of my computer in LAN. One of
>> the windows machine acts as the web server (internal) for the LAN but
>> I can't figure out how to get the web page served by that machine in
>> my fedora. Just typing the hostname (http://hostname) doesn't work, I
>> have to put the IP address to see the page. What's wrong with DHCP
>> setting? and how to fix this?
>>
>> By the way all computers in my LAN have dynamic address which is
>> handled by DSL modem router. Other windows machine is behaving
>> correctly, only fedora installation is not. What do I need to do? I
>> also checked the network settings and found nothing to do with that as
>> it has all automatic option checked. 
>>     
>
> Okay, why and how does it work with the other machines?  Do they have
> their own hosts file with the webserver's numerical IP and named
> addresses?  (Not a good idea with dynamic DHCP-set addresses, but fine
> if you set your DHCP server to always provide the same addresses to the
> same machine - static addressing.)  Is Windows doing some other
> tomfoolery to try and figure out name resolution?
>
> Does your modem/router's DHCP server update a DNS server with the
> addresses, and are all your computers configured to use that DNS server?
> They should all be configured to use the same DNS server, but it's been
> my experience that modem/routers don't act as a local DNS servers for
> the machines that they dole out addresses to using DHCP.  Say what model
> modem/router you have, someone might know how it works, in particular.
>
> In my case, I don't use my modem/router as neither my DHCP nor DNS
> servers, I do that on a Fedora-running PC behind it.  I can control a
> computer-based server exactly how I want to, the router controls are
> very limited.
>   

I'm not an expert, but by how I've always understood it, Windows 
machines use DNS entries, hosts file entries, and *NetBIOS* name 
broadcasts to look up other computers. So, your hostname on your windows 
webserver is found by the other windows machines because they're looking 
up the NetBIOS name, but Linux doesn't search NetBIOS to find IP 
addresses. I bet if you did an 'nmblookup hostnamehere' (where 
hostnamehere is the name of the windows box), the Linux computer would 
be able to find it. The way to fix that is to do what others are 
suggesting and either give the windows server a static IP (which is 
usually suggested for a server) or to get the DHCP server to register 
the computer with a DNS server.

Hope this clarifies your problem.

Justin Willmert