Registering hostname in DNS?

Stark

Heya,

I was wondering if anyone knows the solution to this. I've a linux box that receives an IP address from a DHCP server but uses its own hostname. On Windows, there's an option in network settings to "Register this hostname in DNS". Does anyone know how to do the equivalent on Linux?

HomunQlus

I'm not exactly sure what you mean...

However, you could try to run this as root

/etc/init.d/named start

This will start a caching-only nameserver in most distributions, that should do all you need.

Stark

Okay, well, at the moment, I need to get my co-workers to enter my IP and hostname into their hosts files, before they can access my machine by its hostname. I want to be able to register my hostname with the lab's DNS server so they don't have to do that. Windows machines currently do that, but I haven't found the option in Linux to do it.

HomunQlus

I think in that case you have to open the hosts file on the lab's DNS

/etc/hosts

and enter the IP adress and the name of the machine to that file, and just to be sure, restart the DNS server (the daemon, not the entire computer).

That's how I solved it.

niallb

What dhcpclient are you using? There are several.
pump and dhclient are both very common.
It depends on which ditribution you use,
so that's the first thing to let us know.

If you have a file called dhclient-eth0.conf (or eth1, whatever)
in /etc/ or /etc/dhcp/ look for a line like:

send host-name "insertyourdesirednamehere";
and make sure it's not commented out.

NiallB

voxpop

if your mates are using windows systems, you prob want a netbios name, running samba on your machine will give you that.

niallb

This may have helped with your problem H.,
but the dns server doesn't read from the /etc/hosts file,
so this won't help here.

All that happened is that your nameserver now knew where the host was.
It still wouldn't have been able to answer a lookup through dns.

NiallB

HomunQlus wrote:

I think in that case you have to open the hosts file on the lab's DNS

/etc/hosts

and enter the IP adress and the name of the machine to that file, and just to be sure, restart the DNS server (the daemon, not the entire computer).

That's how I solved it.

ressem

If you're using redhat/centos (probably fedora also) adding
DHCP_HOSTNAME=myhostnamehere

to the
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

will allow this argument to be used in your ifup script in the same directory

Then
service network restart
to actually activate.

This assumes that you have your windows DHCP server setup to pass this info to your windows DNS server.

administrative tools/DHCP
Right click on the dhcp server. Choose properties
DNS tab
Make sure
'Automatically update DHCP client information in DNS'
Always update DNS