[CLUE-Tech] DHCP and DNS and Intro

[Michael Riversong]

This Libranet thing sounds very interesting -- i want to follow up on 
it, to see if my little computer lab would benefit from this.  Is there 
a web site that stands above the rest?

So you folks know, i recently joined this group, but i'm not in Denver.  
I used to live there, and worked as a computer consultant from 1983 
through 1990, before starting a different business.  Now, i live way up 
in Cheyenne, and only occasionally visit the Big City.  Last year, i was 
hired to start up a computer lab for a small private school here.  I 
consciously decided to include Linux from the very beginning, and it has 
been appreciated by many of our students.  Interestingly enough, 
elementary students have often liked it the best.  I have even put a few 
Kindergartners on it, with good results.

At the moment we are using Red Hat 7.3 on two machines, Corel 1.0 on 
two, and Red Hat 6.1 on a remote machine i've set up in another 
building.  Since we have to work exclusively on donated equipment, it's 
been necessary to work with older distributions at times.  Nothing is 
networked yet, as we await a donation of cabling and routers.  And i'm 
always on the lookout for educational programs that can be installed on 
our machines.

So anyway it is great to see this group thriving, and i hope to meet 
many of you sometime, perhaps over the summer as random assignments take 
me to Denver on meeting nights.

And i also want to know what district Mr. Frank is working for.

On Friday, May 23, 2003, at 05:33 AM, Joe Linux wrote:

> Why do educational officials always insist upon one size fits all?  It 
> seems to be an educational administrator a prerequisite is a total lack 
> of creativity and individuality.  What happened to academic freedom and 
> school choice, and the independence from a central administration 
> within an individual school unit?  I ask this on behalf of Libranet 
> which I used for about a year (1.9).  It was the finest computer system 
> I ever owned.  Perhaps it would be better for the robotic group think 
> administrators to learn about Libranet than for you to be forced to 
> change distributions.
>
> Roger Frank wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
Michael Riversong
http://home.earthlink.net/~mriversong
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