Hello all,

I'm having trouble with DNS on a Slackware 9 system. The machine is set up as a DHCP client, talking to a FreeBSD DNS/DHCP server. The SW9 box has no problems getting an IP lease, but the DNS is failing. When I try "nslookup sylvester" I get a "server can't find sylvester: NXDOMAIN" response. I tried host and DIG to get more information but they didn't help much. I know NXDOMAIN means a non-existent domain, but I don't know how that can be. The resolv.conf has the right nameserver and search domain.

The dhclient.conf on the host is:

interface "eth0"
{
send host-name "sylvester";
}

The other FreeBSD machines are fine with the same dhclient.conf and happily look up the other BSD and Windows boxes on the network. It seems to me that I'm not sending the right hostname to the DNS box.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Damien

Im not that familiar with Slack, but in RH (and i assume there's a similar file in slack) there's a file called ifcfg-eth0 in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory.
If you put an entry in there with DHCP_HOSTNAME="yourhostname" it should work. (At least, that did the trick for me...)

Ha ha ha ho ho ho am I STOOOOOPID or what? The corresponding file is rc.inet1 in the /etc/rc.d directory for Slackware. I tried using the entry for DHCP_HOSTNAME, except that I did something wrong. I could save face here by just saying "thanks, that worked", but I think everyone needs a good laugh now and then. I didn't put the hostname in, did I? I had the #$%^&@! SERVER name in there. Sigh. Now that I've changed it to the hostname, everything works.

Yeeeesh, if I was any dumber, I'd think that a proprietary OS with the GUI welded to the kernel was a really good idea....

Thanks Satch.

Damien