[CLUE-Tech] AT&T Broadband

[Dave Anselmi]

Sean LeBlanc wrote:

> Some questions about AT&T that I forgot to add to my original email:
>
> ObLinux: Does anyone have much experience with setting up cache-only DNS
> servers? This might help with the sporadic resolving issues...esp. with the
> mail server.

I happen to have the DNS book at the moment.  It seems to indicate that you just use a
regular name server.  For 'cache only' you'd just leave all the usual DNS records out of
config.  I guess that if you set up a nameserver it will talk to the world and bypass
your ISP's servers, unless you tell it to use the ISP servers as forwarders.

>  Also, in my ipchains script I run from rc.local, I used to have
> my hard-coded IP value in it. Is there any way to substitute stuff in their
> for "current IP number for a certain interface"?

I don't know ipchains much, can you use the interface instead of the IP?  Also, if the
interface is up you can ask it for it's IP - run ifconfig through sed or awk or perl and
substitute the result.

> Also, how about a DHCP server?  Anyone out there done that?  I doubt I'll
> really need to do this as I hope that their nameservers aren't changing
> much, but it'd probably be good to do.

Yes, not too hard.  The config file is pretty flexible, so the doc on it is long and
intimidating.  But getting something simple working wasn't too hard.  That's the ISC
server by Ted Lemon.

DHCP clients are easy too.  I've done dhclient (the one from ISC that debian uses) and
dhcpcd.  Rather than using ifconfig to set up an interface, you just run one of these and
it Just Works(tm).

BTW, DHCP 3 is out - among other things, provides failover and dynamic dns updates which
are cool.

Dave