I was having a conversation with one of my co-workers about setting up my local LAN in such a way that my FC4 box is a local DNS server for the other boxes on my network. He suggested a program which shares the entries in /etc/hosts, making them available to any box on the network.

For example, lets say that my /etc/hosts looks like this:


# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.98 baz.localdomain baz
192.168.1.99 bar.localdomain bar


My FC4 box is baz. Any other box on my network would then be able to use 192.168.1.98 as its DNS server, and resolve 'bar', 'bar.localdomain', 'baz' or 'baz.localdomain'.

My only problem is that I can't remember what the name of this program is .

Pdnsd, a caching DNS server with a persistent (reboot surviving) cache, allows you to load /etc/hosts(like) files and serve them as DNS records.

I've done some googling, I think that dnsmasq was the service in question, but I'm going to check out pdnsd as well.

If anyone's looking for simple dnsmasq info, check http://www.enterprisenetworkingplane...le.php/3377351

I've used dnsmasq ever since I posted this, it works like a champ. It's also a very good dhcp server, allowing me to give the same IP address and domain name to my wife's laptop every time she connects to our wireless access point (assigned via MAC address).