Re: WLAN router doesn't provide fix IP addresses
Hi
On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 09:28:33AM +0100, B. M. wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I have a problem with my (w)lan setup. We use telephone and
> internet over the cable network and the company gives us a wlan
> modem for free. Unfortunately this modem doesn't allow me to specify
> fix IPs in the internal network for all of our machines.
Well - even if it doesn't, surely it allows you to specify which
*range* of IP addresses should be used for DHCP?
There is nothing wrong with configuring a server with a fixed IP
address (=not use DHCP client), as long as you use the correct
network, netmask and default gateway.
> Nevertheless I setup an owncloud server on one machine (which is
> somehow our "server" but not always running), including SSL
> encryption with a self-signed certificate for its IP address. That
> worked well for a couple of months because the IP addresses didn't
> change (although they were not fixed).
Oh. certificates for IP addresses is a new one on me :-)
> Now due to a technical problem our modem got replaced all of the IP
> addresses changed. (I did expect that for sometime in the
> future... but not so early...)
>
> Since it's impossible to manually define the IP addresses, I've a
> problem. Of course I could create a new certificate, put it on all
> other machines and adjust all settings (owncloud server address...);
> but that's quite an hassle.
Do the machines use avahi (or mdns? I'm actually not sure of the name,
but having libnss-mdns installed and "mdns4" mentioned in
/etc/nsswitch.conf would indicate so).
If so, you should be able to use "${hostname}.local" instead of an IP
address, and the multicast DNS resolution would sort things out.
> So I wanted to ask if there are other possibilities? I can define
> one or two DNS server in the modem's config. Would it work to setup
> my main machine (which is not always running) as an internal DNS
> server and use the hostnames instead of the IP addresses?
That is also a possibility. But if it is only for facilitating a
single server, then it's overkill. And it adds a single point of
failure too: you would not be able to resolve IP addresses while the
machine is down.
If you already own/run a domain, you can also add a A record in the
DNS for this to point to it - e.g. "owncloud.example.com IN A
192.168.0.45".
Using an entry in /etc/hosts is also an option.
Hope this helps
--
Karl E. Jorgensen
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