[CLUE-Tech] DHCP and DNS

[Roger Frank]

For some time I've kept my Linux lab at school under the radar beam of
the district IT people.  We now have new district IT people, and they are
happy for me to use Linux as long as it is the version that they are
going to be using.  That's good news, though I must say goodbye to
Libranet 2.8, which is a wonderful distribution.  At least I don't need
to be in stealth mode.

But here's the question.  I now have to give up my fixed IP addresses.
I'll use DHCP, and that works fine.  Some machine at the school is
giving out addresses, and that's not a Linux machine.  But I need to
be able to get to each machine from the Linux server.  So how do
I lookup the IP address of a machine that has gotten it through DHCP?
I know the (fixed) address of the DNS server (192.168.1.3) but that
doesn't seem to have local addresses. 

To make this a little more complicated, I want each student machine
to NFS mount a directory on the Linux server.  If that server reboots
and gets a new IP address, then the /etc/fstab entry that would have
been hardcoded to the (formerly fixed) IP address of the NFS server
is not going to work.  And if I refer to it by name, it won't be
found through DNS, at least not through the 192.168.1.3 district-wide
DNS server.

Any suggestions?  Thanks.

---
Roger Frank