about a dhcp served (home/small bus) lan

harry.putnam · ‎03-03-2011

I've run a home lan of 8-9 machines for a number of years, and allways have used static IP addressing. But it is a bit of pain to keep up with over time, especially if you experiment from time to time with virtual machines on the network. Keeping up with hosts files and such can get to be somewhat of time sync.

Never that big a deal but still enough to make me wonder if a totally DHCP served lan might not be easier all around.

However, every time I've experimented by setting a couple of machines to be dhcp served I find I can no longer contact those machines without going to some lengths to learn there IP addresses. But I see DHCP is a somewhat popular way to do things so thinking to give it a try again.

I'm wondering if I'm just really missing the boat of how this is done.

Here is an example of how I might typically use my lan:

From mach1 where I do most of my work, I might SSH to a remote on the lan, but of course SSH wants a host name or IP number to connect to.

How do I supply the host IP when it has been dhcp servered. Well, what I would do in this case, is to go to the remote mach, since it is only in antoher room, and at its physical console, run a web browser to connect to the lan HTTP server where I've kept a small cgi script that when hit from a web browser will show the clients IP address, as pulled from HTTP environment.

Then armed with that IP number, go back to mach1 and make the SSH connection. I might have several such connections active to several lan machines, during a regular working session

Even if I resort to the native windows protocol, smb, I find that the network sites served by dhcp are now inaccessible, unless I edit the hosts files temporarily, and even then may take a while to propigate and be accessible from mach1. Or just use numeric IPs only temporarily for dhcp served machines.

I hope I'm just missing something obvious, but how do others manage to connect with machines on the lan when using DHCP?

Can anyone describe an example of home lan using DHCP networking? Maybe, explain how the machines communicate quickly and easily.

Paul_Christian317 · ‎03-03-2011

Are you using windows based PCs ? Mac? Linux?

In Active Directory (microsoft) , you can have machines joined to your domain, and they report their name and ip address to the DNS server when they receive an IP via DHCP. Active Directory is dependent on DNS (internal , not external).

A microsoft workgroup environment is dependent on NetBIOS , which isn't as good as straight up DNS. I think it's generally slower if it works at all. It's also less secure from my understanding.

There's a lot more stuff about active directory that's superior to a work group environment, like granular control over server/network resources, et cetera.

I'm not sure how linux/unix based machines communicate with eachother.