On 7/28/2010 10:48 AM, Frank J. Gómez wrote:
> Thanks for your responses, Les.  I wonder if you could clarify a few
> things for me:
>
>     Why don't you add a 'search' directive to qualify a bare hostname into
>     your (real or made-up) domain to keep it in your own namespace?
>
>
> What would you suggest here?  The servers that have static IP addresses
> have DNS records for hostname.loc (e.g., backuppc.loc).  However, I'm
> not having any problems resolving those.  Where I'm struggling is with
> staff laptops that connect to the network via DHCP.  How should I
> qualify vostro1400 to make it resolve correctly?  If I append ".loc,"
> there still won't be a vostro1400.loc record in DNS; vostro1400 could
> connect with a different IP each time it comes into the office.

Your problem is that DNS is succeeding.  Make it fail and the dhcp hosts 
should then try the lookup with nmblookup.

>
>     That seems wrong - but so does qualifying the name with a terminating
>     '.' in DNS.  The other way to avoid the problem would to remove the
>     forwarders from your dns server and let them do the job right.
>
>
> I thought using forwarders /was/ the right way to do DNS.

Forwarders are kind of irrelevant - DNS is global and your own resolver 
is as good as anyone else's.  The only advantage of a forwarder is that 
popular names may be cached and reused by the forwarding clients without 
bothering the root servers again.

>  I admit I
> could be mistaken here, but if my DNS server is just mapping a few local
> hostnames to IPs, I need some way to return the right IP when someone
> asks for google.com <http://google.com> or some other domain outside of
> my control.  Is there a better way to do this?

You have the right idea, but DNS depends on domain namespaces that are 
delegated.  If you don't have a registered domain, you can still 
configure your DNS server to be primary for some made-up zone and it 
will respond with an authoritative failure if the host does not exist in 
that domain instead of passing the query on.  The problem is that you 
aren't qualifying bare hostnames into your own domain with the search 
directive before trying to look them up.

It is probably also possible to configure your DNS server to dynamically 
register the DHCP hosts - or even better if the network is flat, 
configure the DHCP server to always give the same MAC address the same 
IP so you can make a static entry in DNS for it.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com





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