I use Win2K ICS to provide internet access to several commputers
on a small peer-peer network with a few Windows machines running
Win2K and Win98 and a couple of machines running Slackware linux
10.2.

I have the windows clients setup to receive their IP addresses
from the ICS DHCP mini server and have also set the Linux machines
to obtain their IP's from DHCP. This works well for internet
connection sharing on all machines, but I also have need to
provide File and Print Sharing for these computers. The Windows
machines seem to accept entries in the LMHOSTS file which are
generalized IP references:

192.168.0. win2kclient
192.168.0. win98client

However, Samba doesn't like this and seems to require a specific
IP address in the LMHOSTS file on the Linux machines.

The windows clients appear to receive the same IP assignment, as
in a static IP address, from the ICS DHCP server on each boot, but
the Linux machines IP assignments change each bootup.

How do I configure Samba (i.e.LMHOSTS) to reflect the DHCP IP
assignment to provide workable File and Print Sharing under this
type of setup?

I would configure the Linux machines for a static IP address so that you don't have to bother about ever changing IP addresses. Just make sure that you pick static IP addresses that are not leased by the ICS DHCP mini-server. There is no rule that states that you must only use DHCP.

Eric

True enough, but I was intent on solving the problem with DHCP.

Turns out that the Remote Cache on the WIN2K machine is not
being updated when I boot a Linux box. Since the IP assignments
from ICS don't change on the WIN98 boxes, the Remote Cache still
contains the correct IP addresses for these machines and there
is no problem here. In fact, I removed all of the LMHOSTS files
from the WIN2k and WIN98 machines as they don't seem to be
needed. I find I can now simply enter a "nbtstat -R" on the
WIN2k machine to clear the Remote Cache and recreate it with the
updated IP address assignments for the Linux boxes and
connectivity is once again reestablished.

I have recently read about creating a dhclient.conf with an option
'send host-name' which will send the hostname to the DHCP server to
update the DNS, but I'm not sure if this will work.

Any other thoughts appreciated.

My other (first) thought was: get rid of ICS if you have Slackware in the house! Using a Slackware gateway with DHCP/DNS server and NAT will be much better performance wise.

Eric

Actually, I do dual boot the WIN2K machine with Slackware Linux 10.2
and use Linux DHCP and a NAT firewall using IPTABLES to proved ICS to
client machines.

You're right of course. Using Linux as the gateway is much preferred.

And security wise, and uptime wise, and......

I use a notebook as a NAT for one of my networks, and has been up for approx 3 months straight now, no downtime, no sucessfull attacks.

To echo what others have said - no reason to use DHCP on such a small network.

The only reason I can see using DHCP is if you have a very large network, and a very small vlan (number of IP addresses available) - so you share the limited resource of IPs among the pool of machines. This breaks down if all of the machines are connecting to the network concurrently. Additionally, I have seen problems with consumer grade router/firewalls locking up due to DHCP requests from Microsoft machines --- there are known problems with Microsoft's DHCP implimentation.

I see too many sysadmins using DHCP as a crutch to ease their management burden. This is LAZY. Keep track of the machines on your network! There are tools to make this easy (e.g. CFEngine). Additionally having static IP addresses will make managing logs easier (instead of having to track down MAC addresses).

I also use DHCP, and static IP's. I use the DHCP for temp connects, and firewall the DHCP addresses from the rest of the network.

As far as what I use to keep track of my static IPs, it's an old,old,old peice of hardware. It's called a 'PENCIL'. You may have seen them in museums. They write on a piece of a tree called a 'PAPER'. Try it. Gotta love analog sometimes....lol