Dick Davies wrote:
Yeah I suppose I could do that, but it just seems like a very manual approach to either scratch DHCP, or give every machine on the network a reservation.* Paul Scott <paslist@ultrasw.com> [0745 18:45]:But that doesn't guarantee that a given named machine will get the same IP each time which is what the OP wanted.It is the job of the dhcp server to assign them IP numbers.Why don't you just map MAC addresses to IPs? isc-dhcpd can certainly do that.
To answer other questions in the thread... right now I just have 4 machines plus a linksys router, the number is growing fairly rapidly now however.
Ideally I want it to work like a domain, so I'm not adverse to making a proper domain... In part because I don't want to deal with the .hosts file that we're talking about, and in larger part because this network is going to be a model for several other networks I'll be setting up and it simply won't be an option in those cases, people will need to be able to just add a windows machine without any configuration of the network and need to be able to see the whole network.
I'm curious about the Samba suggestion posted as it seems to fit best with what I'm trying to actually achieve, also it sounds like just moving the DHCP server off the linksys and onto the debian server is probably the wisest and most robust option, not sure how that works with wireless though. Thanks for all the discussion and help on the topic.