[CLUE-Tech] DHCP and DNS

[Chris Tubutis]

>> 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.


IMHO it's never a good idea for servers to get IP addresses via DHCP. I
don't remember all the details of how to do this, but I'll bet your
school's DHCP server can be configured to always give the same IP
address(es) to your specified MAC address(es) using leases that don't
expire. See if you can get your DHCP admins to allow/configure this. I
also seem to recall that at least some DHCP servers have the ability to
dynamically update DNS but of course the functionality needs to be
enabled and configured.

Hope this helps.

ct