[ILUG] DHCP on home LAN?

[Michael Conry]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2004 17:32:11 +0000, Ciaran Mulloy <cmulloy at esatclear.ie> wrote:
> The only difficulty is that not being too familiar with DNS server and found
> the howto somewhat intimidating (just to set up a 4 pc network at home!). I
> can use the scp and sftp commands to move data between machines but I have to
> use the IP address each time. From your post I think all I need to do is
> install pdnsd to be able to use host names. Question will it pick up the fact
> that the DHCP server is running on the Zyxel DSL modem.
If you just install pdnsd, or any dns server, on a computer on your
network, it will have no way of knowing what ipaddressess are being
given to what computer's interfaces by a DHCP server on the network. 
If you set up your dhcp server to always give computer A (or rather
MAC address "A") a particular ip address, then you can reflect this
information in your dns server setup and get the correct
hostname-to-physical_interface mapping by attaching the appropriate
hostname to this ipaddress.

To make this work requires configuration of your dhcp server.  I don't
know the details of your modem, but I looked up a manual of a Zyxel
62something's web interface and the config section for dhcp indicated
that you can create up to 8 pools of  ipaddresses.  A pool can be as
small as one address, and this can be mapped to a specific MAC address
so you can give static local ip addresses to a few hosts, and leave a
pool of floating addresses for any others.  It would appear that you
can also tell the modem to use another internal (or external) dhcp
server.

To get the clients to look to the pdnsd server for dns, you must
insert appropriate information in the DHCP configuration.  Then, you
must ensure that the pdnsd server can get access to outside DNS
servers on the internet in order to be able to get the information it
needs to provide to internal hosts.
m