[K12OSN] DNS instead of /etc/hosts

[Rob Owens]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 04:29:45PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Rob Owens wrote:
> >Yes, I am talking about the names for the thin clients.  But my dhcp
> >server will also be handing out names to windows clients, and some of
> >those windows clients will need to be accessible by hostname (for
> >sharing printers and so forth).  The default setup will have all those
> >machines being known as "ws001", etc. by the LTSP server.  I expect this
> >will cause trouble, but maybe I'm wrong.
> 
> There is a mechanism for DHCP assigned clients to register their own 
> hostnames into DNS but I've never trusted it and think that if a machine 
> is going to be providing services it should have a static IP and a fixed 
> address in DNS.  

I've been looking into this a bit, and it looks like there are some
complications with having Linux DHCP updating a Windows DNS server.  I
don't completely understand all the complications, but I guess I'd
better avoid that route.

> You can do this without hand-configuring the machines 
> if you make the DNS entries tie the names to addresses, then use host 
> entries in your dhcpd.conf file with:
> 
> host somename {
>   hardware ethernet 00:30:c1:01:ce:1d;
>   fixed-address somename_from_dns;
>   ... any other options;
> }
> 
> That way they will always get the name you associated with the address 
> and you only have to keep track of IP address changes in the DNS zone file.

This is probably what I'll end up doing.  In the case of standalone
Windows machines with a shared printer attached, do I need to specify a
static IP address?  I'm under the impression that Windows machines don't
use IP address or DNS name to find other Windows machines--I think they
use some sort of Microsoft-specific voodoo, but I might be wrong.

Thanks for the advice guys.

-Rob