[ILUG] DHCP on home LAN?

[Ciaran Mulloy]

On a slightly related topic I recently installed a broadband connection with a 
Zyxel Prestige 600 Series ethernet DSL modem with built-in DHCP. This is very 
handy because it plugs straight into a ethernet hub giving me broadband 
connection to all PCs on the LAN. Given that I am not an professional 
sysadmin it would never have occurred to me to use DHCP but it was so simple 
it nearly would have taken more effort to set up a non-DHCP broadband sharing 
network. 

The only difficulty is that not being too familiar with DNS server and found 
the howto somewhat intimidating (just to set up a 4 pc network at home!). I 
can use the scp and sftp commands to move data between machines but I have to 
use the IP address each time. From your post I think all I need to do is 
install pdnsd to be able to use host names. Question will it pick up the fact 
that the DHCP server is running on the Zyxel DSL modem. As far as I can see 
there is minimal configuration possible as it doesn't have a dhcp.conf file, 
there are some settings that can be changed through a http access to modem.

My next project is to install NIS and NFS on the network.

Ciaran Mulloy


On Saturday 06 November 2004 16:28, Michael Conry wrote:
> 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

-- 
Regards,
Ciaran Mulloy,
Mobile: +353 87 251 3155
Home: +353 1 288 4900
email: cmulloy at esatclear.ie
Public Key Location: hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net
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