I know that I can explicitly indicate a coorelation between an IP address on my network and a computer name in /etc/hosts. But I'd prefer not to have to do this. What do I have to install so that the computers on my LAN are all automatically known to me?

You could run your own name server and add your own entries - when you set up networking for the machines on the lan, point them at your custom nameserver, which will look up all address using the external nameserver you specify, but any internal names will be returned as specified.

Is there any reason that you don't want to do this? Do you often have computers moving around on your lan or..?

Maybe we can see a different solution if you describe your situation a bit more :)

Steve

I'm just lazy. I've had some IP changes in the past that have screwed with me a bit. I want to alleviate this problem.

You could create only 1 /etc/hosts file on only 1 of your computers and run a TFTP server on it.
make sure that your hosts file is in the /tftpboot directory of your TFTP server.

On all your other computers you could run a script that "tftp" the hosts file.

The script looks like this
#! bash
cd /etc
tftp get tftpserver-ip hosts

you MUST use TFTP and not FTP since TFTP does not require authentication.

In order to be aware of changes, you can use the script in a cron job, or just execute it at boot time

configure tftp server on linux is VERY easy :

http://www.linux.com/howtos/Clone-HO...tting-up.shtml

This will save you headaches with DNS configurations and allow your network hosts manageable.

But how do they do it in large organizations? With Windows, it's like you just plug it in and it appears on the network browser. Isn't there something in the Linux world I can use to get that same kind of ease of use?