Hi,

From a semi-newbie... I'm slowly coming out of my windows shell.

I will first describe my setup. I have an SMC Barricade Router w/ 8-port Switch. My router has an address of 192.168.1.254. I do not have a WAN connection established yet (waiting for DSL to be available in my area). This router is currently connecting 2 Xboxes, 2 PS2s, and 4 desktop/laptop PC's. I have the ability to let DHCP take over in the router, but for the moment, I need to control what IP addresses are set to each computer. My Windows XP desktop PC has an IP of 192.168.1.1. I have DHCP assigning within the range of 192.168.1.100 and 192.168.1.199. I have successfully configured my router with my XP PC. I also have been successfully FTP'ing to my modded Xbox, playing multiplayer games with Xbox and PS2, and have been sharing files between all 4 Windows PC's.

It's time for me to network the Red Hat 8 distribution in the second partition of my XP PC. I would like the full computer name for each to match this pattern:

computername.123anystreet.city.state.country

My Windows XP PC has a NetBIOS name of cparkerpc-winxp. The full name when I ping it should be cparkerpc-winxp.80mainstreet.boston.ma.us (or something similar). The workgroup it belongs to is 80MAINSTREET.

What do I need to do in order to manually configure my Red Hat system to follow this naming and IP-assigning scheme I've laid out? When I was installing Red Hat and had the option of letting DHCP take over or setting manually, I elected to set manually. I plan on sharing files via SMB, so the NetBIOS name for my Red Hat system (through SAMBA) is going to be cparkerpc-rhat8. Its IP address should be 192.168.2.1 (the second operating system of my first node on the network). Its FULL name should be cparkerpc-rhat8.80mainstreet.boston.ma.us. When I attempted to set 80mainstreet.boston.ma.us as the domain during install, I got an error saying I could only have it begin and end with numeric characters. hmm. I have 80mainstreet.boston.ma.us set for my Windows machines, and I have it set on my Router without any problems.

When I start my computer with Red Hat, it currently says "Welcome to localhost.localdomain". I want it to say "Welcome to cparkerpc-rhat8.80mainstreet.boston.ma.us".

Should I be doing anything differently? When I attempted to change the network configuration, I could no longer access the router via HTTP to attempt configuration with my Red Hat system. (Before I changed anything, I could access the router via HTTP with my Red Hat system.)

I have the router's IP address set as the Default Gateway for my Red Hat system, and of course, my subnet mask is 255.255.255.0.

Thanks for reading and for your help!

If you need any additional information about my setup, please feel free to ask by hitting "Reply".

I thought I should also ask what I should be doing on the "DNS" section of the Network Configuration window in Red Hat. I have the option of setting the Hostname, Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary DNS, and Search Domains. What's all of this? Following my naming scheme I described, what should I be filling out here? How do DNS's come into play for me? Does my router act as a Domain Name Server? Will it do so even though I'm not telling my Red Hat system to auto-configure using DHCP?

Also... should I be adding anything additional under the "Hosts" section of the Network Configuration window? This should act as a local, static DNS record for me, correct?

I need to get all of this sorted out before I attempt to apply the stuff I've learned about SAMBA. If anyone knows of any helpful/useful resources to learn more about DNS management such as what I'm trying to accomplish, I'd appreciate a mention of this/these resource(s).

Thanks again!

I'll try something more simple first (such as testing.tst or similar), before worrying about my current naming scheme.

I don't see why it wouldn't work, because a domain name like 80mainstreet.com is valid according to Network Solutions.

I've been doing some searching but still nothing coming up for DNS configuration, etc. Help will still be appreciated. What is everyone else's experience?

I wouldn't mind being able to set up Apache on my Red Hat system, IIS or Apache on my Windows systems, and then access information, etc about each system by typing in its address in my web browser (either by IP [192.168.1.1], internal domain address [cparkerpc-winxp.80mainstreet.boston.ma.us], hostname [cparkerpc-winxp], or alias [localhost, localhost.localdomain to access local computer's information page]). Any number of these examples (preceded by http://) should work for me, correct?

Once again, thanks for reading.

I just realized that my IP setup could be considered a bit messy... also, the fact that I'm using 255.255.255.0 as my subnet mask while I have differing subnets 192.168.1. and 192.168.2. could be part of my problem... I'm going to try changing my subnet mask everywhere to 255.255.0.0. ...unless I don't fully understand the purpose of the subnet mask and am doing something that will only break my LAN.

Please, anyone feel free to add your comments despite my ramblings.

Thanks.

Hmmph. I just realized something else, as well....

In my Windows machines, if I view my Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties, I have the IP addresses set manually, and I have the Preferred DNS Server and Alternate DNS Server fields intentionally left blank. Everything works fine with my Windows machines. Why should I even have to worry about DNS stuff for my Red Hat machine?

Anyone?

first off i looked over your posts quickly

1. the name u want to assign your machine would be done with:

hostname (then the full name u want)

2. the dns entries in windoze are left blank because on a dial connection like yours your modem is assigned the dns servers ip from your isp upon dialup.

when u change to dsl and use either net i assume, you will need to enter dns servers ip's into the nic properties regardless of whether u hard code em in or leave it to dhcp

G

Forward: The page that contains my router's specs is at http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?sec=Pro...rod=243&site=c

One thing I'm not quite grasping... why do I need to reference an external DNS server (such as my ISP's) in order to resolve the names of the computers on my internal network?

For my purposes, I need to develop this network as an independant, separate, isolated entity. For all I know, we may not have a broadband connection around here for another year. I'd like to have my network up and running before then.

I'm aware of the hostname <computername> command. However my question went beyond the scope of merely the hostname. Is it true that I cannot use numeric characters in the "domain name", which will be included as a part of the full computer name I will be referencing?

In my router's configuration screen, there is a section for "DNS" (under "WAN"):

Using the above information in my router's configuration screen for DNS, I determined that I won't be needing this yet, because I won't be connecting to the Internet through the router just yet. As far as I understand, this is strictly for external Internet/WAN use.

What I'm trying to do is for internal use. My concern is the "LAN" section for my router's configuration. I go straight there.

I have the capability of specifying the following options on the "LAN" section:

• IP Address of Router: 192.168.1.254
• IP Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0 (Unchangable)
• DHCP Server: Enabled
• Lease Time: Forever
• Start IP of IP Address Pool: 192.168.1.100
• End IP of IP Address Pool: 192.168.1.199
• Domain Name: 80mainstreet.boston.ma.us

This means that I should be able to set 80mainstreet.boston.ma.us as my domain name in Red Hat, correct? I have the Default Gateway in Red Hat set to 192.168.1.254. I have the IP address in Red Hat set to 192.168.2.1. If I set the domain name in Red Hat to the one in my router, and I restart, when I log on, I get an error.

Maybe I'm entering the wrong thing for my "hostname" in the "DNS" tab. I entered just 80mainstreet.boston.ma.us. I think perhaps I should have entered cparkerpc-rhat8.80mainstreet.boston.ma.us and then added this as an alias under the "Hosts" tab.

These two tabs can be seen at http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...neat-hosts.png and http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...g/neat-dns.png

I'll play around with this and let you know what happens.

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I'm confident I have a solution:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...onfig-dns.html

The page at the URL above tells me that the hostname is set on the "DNS" tab. I am not to worry about DNS settings at the moment. I'm still not sure what the "search domain" is, but I'm assuming it's the same as the domain name I set in my router's configuration: 80mainstreet.boston.ma.us. So, that's what I'm putting in there.

On the hosts tab (explained at http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...fig-hosts.html ), I would then need to edit the "localhost" entry and include two other aliases for localhost.localdomain, so that there would be three aliases. These three aliases would be localhost, cparkerpc-rhat8, and cparkerpc-rhat8.80mainstreet.boston.ma.us. Whether or not putting the last one in is overkill (because I'm specifying it as "hostname" on the DNS tab) I don't know... but I'm going to stay on the safe side and include it here, as well.

Would anyone be able to either confirm or correct any of the educated guesses I've made here?

Thank you very much for providing this method for people such as myself to receive help from others, as well as brainstorm and help solve problems on their own. It's been immensely helpful thus far.

Update:

I did what I said I'd do... I used the full, long computername (cparkerpc-rhat8.80mainstreet.boston.ma.us) as the "hostname" on the "DNS" tab. I used the domain name (80mainstreet.boston.ma.us) as the "search domain" on the DNS tab. (Don't know if this is necessary, but it's not hurting anything, so I'm leaving it. )

I also opened an Xterm window and typed the following, just to be sure:

I went over to the "Hosts" tab, and added cparkerpc-rhat8 and cparkerpc-rhat8.80mainstreet.boston.ma.us and I no longer got the error when I started up GNOME. I can also now ping my own computer with any of the four names assigned to 127.0.0.1 (which are localhost.localdomain, localhost, cparkerpc-rhat8.80mainstreet.boston.ma.us, and cparkerpc-rhat8).

I checked my router's documentation, and it appears that all computers accessing its resources need to be on the same immediate subnet (192.168.1.) as it. So, I changed the IP address binded to eth0 (changed it to the next available IP address I had -- 192.168.1.3) and I can now access my router's configuration via Mozilla once again.

This is extremely helpful, because it is now going to help me configure my IP, hostname, etc. on my MS Xbox-based Debian installation.

My next step is to get my SAMBA shares working on my SMB network. I'll probably do what I did with this post and describe the steps I took to get it working, in case anyone else might find my work done with my setup helpful.

Hail root!

P.S.

In case anyone's interested, someone donated a Sun SPARCstation 10 pizza box to me a couple weeks ago. It's just been sitting next to my desktop PC ever since. I plan researching and getting this thing working (with a large hard drive) with the latest Debian GNU/Linux release installed onto it. I initially was interested in the Solaris 9 Operating Environment, but discovered it was non-Free / Proprietary, so I will not be using it. I'll probably be using this as my PDC for centralized SMB/Samba sharing and internal DNS server to resolve hostnames such as cparkerpc-rhat8, cparkerlt-winxp, cparkerxb-debwd, etc., etc....

I also got some sort of an Apple server pizza box donated to me along with this thing. If/when I ever get this thing working (they're both missing some hardware, actually), I may use this as a backup server or something. This is going to require much more research on my part, as I don't have much experience with Apple's hardware...