[ILUG] DHCP on home LAN?

[Michael Conry]

On Sat, 6 Nov 2004 16:08:12 +0000, Timothy Murphy
<tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:
> 
> I do actually use dhcp on my laptop at college, for instance.
> But I suspect it might cause minor problems at home,
> eg my wife also has a laptop, and I have two laptops in principle
> (one is not working at this moment),
> At the moment I can say eg "ssh william" to log into my laptop
> from another machine.
> But if I was running dhcp I would presumably have to find out
> the IP address of william first?
No, it's simpler than that (though I was also under your misconception
before I started using DHCP).  You can record the hardware address of
the laptop's network card in the DHCP config and ensure it always gets
the same IP address/hostname.

Then you could have another block of ip addresses for visiting
machines (for example), that get handed out to systems that aren't set
up to have a fixed ip address.

It is handy then to also run a small dns server so that you don't have
to keep hostname-ipaddress data on all the PCs (you can make changes
on the DHCP/DNS server and all other systems will pick it up).

I use pdnsd, which is a small dns proxy server.  It stores dns data
even between runs of the application, which is handy for dial-up
situation.  Also,it can provide dns for your private home network
essentially by reading the /etc/hosts file on the machine you install
it and offering this information to other computers on your network. 
I think your DHCP config can tell new hosts to use this server for
DNS, which means that if you are using the network to share a dialup
connection the individual hosts don't need to connect to the outside
DNS servers (or know what they are) in order to function properly.
> 
> The reason I asked the question was that the person who answered me
> on a Fedora mailing list
> seemed to think it was very odd _not_ to run dhcp on a home LAN.
Well, i don't know about odd.  I know I had a couple of computers
networked for a long time before I set up DHCP. You can do most things
you want without it, so it's not a necessity for a small network.  But
now that I have it running, I think it's a great idea.  I'd encourage
you to look into it and if you're having difficulty setting it up, I
can share the configs from my own system (I don't have them to hand
right now, but i can get them).

I suppose, I'd probably consider it odd if somebody used to use DHCP
on a network, and then stopped using it.
m