[K12OSN] DNS instead of /etc/hosts

[Les Mikesell]

Rob Owens wrote:
> Yes, I am talking about the names for the thin clients.  But my dhcp
> server will also be handing out names to windows clients, and some of
> those windows clients will need to be accessible by hostname (for
> sharing printers and so forth).  The default setup will have all those
> machines being known as "ws001", etc. by the LTSP server.  I expect this
> will cause trouble, but maybe I'm wrong.

There is a mechanism for DHCP assigned clients to register their own 
hostnames into DNS but I've never trusted it and think that if a machine 
is going to be providing services it should have a static IP and a fixed 
address in DNS.  You can do this without hand-configuring the machines 
if you make the DNS entries tie the names to addresses, then use host 
entries in your dhcpd.conf file with:

host somename {
   hardware ethernet 00:30:c1:01:ce:1d;
   fixed-address somename_from_dns;
   ... any other options;
}

That way they will always get the name you associated with the address 
and you only have to keep track of IP address changes in the DNS zone file.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com