Simple homenetwork, hosts, dhcp question
 

Hi all

I have a desktop with FC5 installed on it as well as WinXP.
A laptop with WinXP and Ubuntu on it wireless.
A linksys wireless router adsl modem.
Broadband still to be hooked on in a couple of days, yah no dial up.
A canon printer.
The Desktop FC5 is hooked to router
The printer is hook to router
The laptop under windows is wirelessly hooked to router with WPA PSK

My question is should I use the DHCP from the router to assign IP address. This is what I do at the moment and I am able to ping each computer and router but for the computers I have to ping the ip address.

They get assigned from 192.168.1.100 by the router.

The laptop has a hostname of evo6 and the desktop has a host name of STI. Both of these show up on the router with the hostname and the ip address that has been assigned.

Why cant i just ping the hostname like, ping STI, from the laptop to desktop, for example? Do you have to have these assigned in the hosts.conf do do this and is that only with static ip's.

Obviously just setting up a simple wired, wireless, router home network so may need to ask some stupid questions in the future.

Look forward to any comments you maybe able to give.

Cheers

Gimmee :):)

You'd need to setup your own DNS server to be able to resolve hostnames on your internal network. You might resolve NetBIOS names on Windows or if your linux distro is running a netbios daemon, but otherwise you'll have to use the IP addresses to ping. Using DHCP from your router should be fine. Be aware if your distro automatically tries to obtain an IP via DHCP when it boots up or if you have to manually bring up the interfaces.

As far as I can tell the distro FC5 on desktop automatically obtains IP adress from router. But depending on if the laptop is booted first or desktop first, the FC5 desktop could have IP address 192.168.1.100 or 192.168.1.101.

How do I allow access to the drive or partions on desktop FC5 if the IP address keep changing. I thought I was meant to mount the drives or partitions with the IP address in fstab. Or am I meant to use Samba.

I have got redhat 9 bible now, so hopefully that will shed some light on my crawling into simple home network setup.

Thanks for your replies

Gimmee :):)

you can set up both of your comps to ask for a static IP adress even tho you have got a DHCP server running on you router.
Eg: 192.168.1.100 for your FC5 and 192.168.1.101 for your windows box. Make sure you enter all the necessary data that matches with the data that the router would give you.
A good way to do that is to let the DHCP server assign you a dyn. IP and chk out the setup in CLI: ifconfig