Summary: I cannot refer to my Linux machine by its hostname from other PCs on a corporate Windows 2000 network (but it can be referred to okay when booted up as Windows ME).
I work in a Windows-centric environment where all the servers are Windows 2000. All client PCs are Windows XP, 98 or ME. The administrators are unfamiliar with, and unsympathetic to all other OSes.
I am trying to set up a Red Hat web server to justify the use of Linux/Apache as a web server when Windows 2000/IIS goes down/gets defaced
I set up a spare PC so it can boot either Windows ME or Red Hat 7.2. The Red Hat 7.2 is a complete/everything install. In Windows ME, I set up the computer to use DHCP and gave a computer name of "mordor" and a workgroup "midgard". I really do not have to use the official domain name unless I need Exchange and file server access. As Windows ME, the PC can be pinged by other Windows PCs on the network using simply "mordor" although pinging with its automatically-assigned IP of 10.1.7.10 works too.
When I boot up that same spare PC using its Red Hat 7.2 partition, I can access it using simply "mordor" for a little while. By "access," I mean using another Windows PC's ping, Putty/SSH and IE (i.e. "mordor" in the IE address line to get the Apache test page). By '"a little while" I mean about 10 minutes, then ping, SSH, and IE using "mordor" says something like host not found. Switching to using IP number (10.1.7.10) access, however, continues to work fine.
Now, in Red Hat 7.2, it makes no difference whether I set networking up as needing to use DHCP or manually assigning a fixed IP (10.1.7.10) -- in both cases, it behaves exactly as I have described above. I set networking up using the KDE GUI: Control Panel > Networking. I used a hostname of "mordor" too.
Somehow it feels as if Windows ME would "update" the network DNS somehow with the computer name, while Red Hat on the other hand isn't doing it with its hostname (the one in /etc/sysconfig/network).
Can anyone help? Has this anything to do with Dynamic DNS (DDNS)? Or needing to set up Samba on Red Hat?
P.S. I tried it with Red Hat 9 (GUI) and the same thing happened. I prefer Red Hat 7.2 only because it needed half the disk space for an "everything" installation.
Thanks in advance!