DHCP & DNS

[Adalbert Prokop]

zephod at cfl.rr.com wrote on Sunday 21 October 2007:

> Here is my simple and, I suspect, very common setup: 2 PCs, one FC6
> Linux, one Windows Vista and a Linksys wireless router. A DHCP server
> on the Linksys determines the IP addresses of the 2 machines.

> My question is: is it possible for either machine to ping the other
> without having to make an entry in its local hosts file?

At least not only with DHCP. It is only for assigning IP addresses and 
parameters to network devices. If you want name-to-address resolving you 
need (an internal) DNS server. That could be your Linksys router. I don't 
know if the original firmware has a DNS server, but WRT54G is flashable. 
That means you can install a small Linux distro on it and within a DNS 
server (dnsmasq or bind or ...). Look here

http://www.freewrt.org/trac/wiki/Documentation/TargetSystems

If you cannot use a DNS server you could use Bonjour/Zeroconf for address 
resolving. Apples Bonjour is available for Windows and Linux has its own 
implementations of the mDNS (multicast DNS) protocoll, e.g. mDNSresponder 
or avahi. mDNS is simmilar to DNS but it does not need a central server 
because every machine is sending broadcast messages on the network 
announcing itself to its neighbours. With help of the nss-mdns package 
you can then resolve the broadcasted names to IP addresses.

For a small office the DHCP/DNS solution is the preferable one.

-- 
bye,
Adalbert

Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking 
about nor whether what is said is true. -- Russell