Addressing a machine in a DHCP environment

win32sux · 10-31-2008, 11:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quakeboy02

Sweet! I'll have to figure out whether I need to do something different for hosts that aren't there or are typed wrong. But, it gives "name_query" in those cases, so that'll probably work well enough.

Thanks again!

Added:
Yes it works.

I'm glad it works. Here's an example of how you might deal with the offline hosts and errors:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

USER_NAME=$2

IP=`nmblookup -B -L $1 | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $1}'`

if echo $IP | grep name_query > /dev/null ; then
 echo "ERROR: Couldn't find an IP for that host. Are you sure it is online?"
else
 rsync -av $USER_NAME@$IP:/fromhere /tothere
fi

This script basically takes two arguments when you call it. The first one is the hostname you want to find the IP for, and the second is the user name you want to use in the rsync command. If the output of the awk on the lookup is "name_query" it will throw an error, otherwise it will do the rsync using the IP which was found and the username you provided.

Quakeboy02 · 10-31-2008, 11:11 PM

Good idea, but I think I'd need:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

USER_NAME=$2

IP=`nmblookup -B -L $1 | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $1}'`

if echo $IP | grep name_query > /dev/null ; then
 echo "ERROR: Couldn't find an IP for that host. Are you sure it is online?"
else
 rsync -av $USER_NAME@$IP:$3 $4
fi

And that's just too confusing for me. (Hey, I'm old and slow, and I'd rather see what I'm doing than have it abstracted off like that.) What I did was put an alias in my .bashrc to ".smblookup.sh"; which is just the script you posted. If the host is offline it gives me an error and that's what I'm looking for, anyway. This is pretty cool.

win32sux · 10-31-2008, 11:21 PM

Haha, word! I'd completely forgot about the directory paths!

Quakeboy02 · 12-01-2008, 06:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by win32sux

Telling a DHCP server to always give you a certain client IP and/or hostname should be really easy (unless your ISP has restricted administration options on the device, or if it lacks them).

I should have spent more time researching this comment, win32sux.

I finally found it:

In file /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf

Code:

change this line:
#send host-name "andare.fugue.com";

to this:
send host-name "hostname";

I did this on each machine, and, at least with this router, I have access by hostname.