IP Networking

I would like to see if anybody can give me any insights on this issue. Possibly somebody may have posted something like this before but provided I couldn't find any matching threads in the forum search, I post it here.

I'm on GNU/Linux with iptables. I have a home LAN with the gateway connected to the Internet using DHCP (dhcpcd). The DNS, a public IP and other details are thus obtained from ISP and dynamically set this way (i.e. the gateway has a dynamic IP).

The internal hosts are manually configured with static private IPs. I have added rules to the gateway's init script to invoke iptables' NAT feature so that internal hosts can now access the Internet. However, the internal hosts do not have the DNS lookup servers configured, so only IPs can be specified as addresses. It works, just pretty inconvenient.

As a temporary solution I looked up the ISP's DNS server addresses and statically configure them individually on each internal host. However, in order to alleviate long-term configuration trouble from changing ISPs or the ISP suddenly changing the addresses of DNS servers, I would like to run a DHCP server on the gateway and have the DNS addresses obtained from dhcpcd available to the internal hosts on startup or whenever the DNS IP changes.

My question is: is this possible or would it be tedious to set up?

Well,

that's exactly what I did at home

My FreeBSD box is my home Gateway on a dial-up account and it is also configured as a DHCP server. This way my WinME ( )box and FreeBSD laptop can join the LAN as soon as they startup and have access to the net without any hassel!

It didn't take too long to configure - you just need to make sure the details in the DHCP config script are correct.

Give it a try ... I think it's a GREAT way to have the ol' home computers set up!