IP Networking

I have a linksys DSL router.

I run a mixed environment of Windows, Linux and Solaris. The routers dhcp tables show the windows machines hostnames and associated IP's ok but the unix bases mahines don't have associated hostnames in the DHCP tables. I can ping by IP but not my the machines hostname. This is a real issue because of NFS shares and the changing of IP by the router.

Is there a way to get the router to see the hostname of the unix machines or do I need to use fixed IP's for the unix machines?

If I have to go with fixed IP's I think I will have to run some namming service such as nis or will the router pick up the hostnames?

Solaris 10, Debian, Kubuntu and OpenBSD os's. The Solaris machines were the hardest to get to know their own host names.

Joe

Way to complicate your life.

If you have a DSL "router", just use static IP's and add the name/IP to /etc/hosts in all of them. In Windows, I think the hosts file is in c:/windows/system32/drv (or something like that).

I'm curious as to why it is important for the "router" to pick the names, though...

I want to do some nfs mounts between the linux and solaris machnes. Since this is at home I supose having several host tables to administer will not be too bad. I am just used to working in an environment with 100's of unix boxes.

We have a project to use DHCP or our solaris workstations at work and If the network does not know the name of the workstation it will be a nightmare to try to administrator.

the more I've been reading about using DHCP with Solaris I think I am going to recomment that we don't do it.

Joe

I don't know what you mean when you say "if the network doesn't know the names", but I don't see what the big issue would be if workstations go to DHCP - never understood why is this a practice inside a LAN, btw; laptops I can see...

The main issue is technical support to the workstation users don't know the ip for their machine and most of the time we get calls is the workstation is crashed out of the app and they can't log off or in. They do know that that they work on caddstationxxx. So, we could get to the workstation if we don't know it's name, and with moving ip's from DHCP we could not just label the machnes with IP's. I also know that there are issues using jumpstart in a DHCP environment.

Kind of odd but no one has been able to tell me how a windows box tells the DHCP server it's name.

Joe

I just figured it out you follow the instructions in /etc/default/dhcpagent then you set the the hostname.

Joe