I have several computers behind a broadband cable router, which I also use as a DHCP server. All the computers get IP addresses okay, they can all access the internet, and I can ping them all by IP address, but I cannot ping some of them by name from each other. I currently have one Linux box, soon to be more, and two Windoze machines running Windows 2K and Windows 98. I can ping the Linux box by name from Windows, but I can't ping the Windows boxes by name from Linux. How do I set up RedHat 9 to be able to resolve host names for machines whose IP addresses are supplied by the DHCP function of my cable router?

Personally, I would setup static ip addresses, or even static dhcp, and do name resolution in hosts files. Your other option would be setting up a DNS server, which there are plenty of tutorials on the web for.

Good Luck,
John

probably if you don't want to have servers running on your workstation machines and don't want to setup
a dedicated machine for the job, you could write a script that scans your arp results for new machines and
append them to each machines hosts file.

arp, grep, cat and cron will do the job, though it's quite a bit of logic within the script, cause you don't want
duplicate or old entries in the hosts file nor a million of lines in the file...

If you are using a linksys cable/dsl router, user your web browser to access the router setup.
If you bring up the DHCP clients table, do the host names show up in the table?

If you have servers running on your linux box, then you will probably want to use a fixed ip address. The linksys routers start the DHCP address at .100 and go up from there. You could select an address ending below .100 and not have to change the router's configuration.

Thanks all. I have decided to go with static IP addresses. I always suspected that would be the solution, I just wondered if there was some way to make the name resolution software in Linux understand what addresses DHCP had assigned to each computer. Now all I have to keep an eye out for is that my ISP doesn't change their DNS server IP addresses on me, because I've hardcoded them on each computer instead of letting DHCP give them to me. If they change and my DNS lookups stop working I'll eventually figure it out...