Hi,

I am having a problem getting the hostname for my machine registered on my internal network. I am running RedHat AS3.0. We have a large network with many names, and I think the resolv.conf is setup properly. I can ping other machines by name, but no other machine can ping me by name, FQDN or otherwise. I setup my hostname by modifying /etc/sysconfig/network, and then restarting /etc/init.d/network.

I can get an IP fine, but my name just isn't getting registered in DNS. This is not a DHCP issue or anything like that because no one else is having this problem, and I have built other Linux machines in the past (different distros) that have worked properly. I initially thought that maybe it was because it is a server build, and servers usually have static IP's with names that must be manually entered into DNS, but I don't know what to change if that is the case.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

well it doesn't look like you're actually making any attempt at all to register your server with any DNS provider... anything in /etc/host, /etc/resolv.conf is purely for internal use. Windows can do name resolution via WINS as well as DNS, something that samba can emulate, but WINS as a protocol is horrible, as it is based on broadcasts, so doesn't scale up to larger networks very well at all.

if you're expecting the hostname to get sucked back across into the DNS server, then I would assume it would be down to your choice of DHCP client, as some will pass back the hostname for referencing automatically. on my machine i personally pass the option "-h hostname" to dhcpcd, otherwise the hostname defined doesn't end up back on the server, for cross matching to other domain DNS servers.

Yes, that is what I want. I want the hostname to get sucked across into DNS. I used to work pretty heavily with another distro, and this used to happen automatically. Now I am using RedHat and it doesn't seem to be working.

I did a 'ps -ef | grep dhcp' to see what dhcp client is running, and it looks like I am using dhclient. Don't really see any parameters in its manpage that lets you specify hostname though. What client are you using, or what client would you advise to use?

I have been trying to look around for some answers to this problem that I am still having, and I found some interesting ideas that may or may not help.

Could something in the kernel be related to this? Are there certain modules that need to be present in the kernel in order to get this working? Do I need to recompile it or something?

Just to follow up with this, I finally got it working. I had to make a change in /etc/hosts and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. The files are below if anyone is interested. Thanks for the help!

/etc/hosts:
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 linuxhost1.localdomain linuxhost1

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
DHCP_HOSTNAME=linuxhost1
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=yes