HI,

New to Unix and I inherited a network that runs DHCP in manual configuration mode. Basically, in order for a machine to get an IP it has to have an entry in dhcpd.conf with its MAC address mapped to a hostname (the hostname then maps to an IP address listed in the DNS db file). If there is no entry in both the dhcpd.conf and the DNS db file the machine will never get an IP from the DHCP server. Does anyone know where this is configured and how I can change this to dynamic/automatic configuration????

Thanks

Njay,

To my understanding there is no way for you to have this done automatically. You can write a script that does this or you can try to install DDNS on your local network.

Which DHCP server is it? Is it ISC's dhcpd? If so there should be a dhcpd.conf file somewhere, depending on your distro, with configurable parameters in there that you can change. And I think dhclient.conf is the file that you actually use to id specific MAC addresses. Otherwise, find out which dhcpd is running and read its documentation. While the current set up you have is good in a security sense, it should be possible for you to change the policy to allow anyone to get an IP on the network.

You might want to find out why the previous admin limited the assignment of IPs thus, there could have been a good reason.