DHCP or fixed IPs for servers ????

[Dave Ihnat]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:07:01PM -0600, linux guy wrote:
> Something I should interject here is that it isn't just setting the IP
> address of the server.   I find the biggest problem is keeping the
> /etc/hosts lists current on all the clients.

Ouch.  That's why you use DNS (of course...you knew that from later comments)

> Is there a way to statically assign the IP address to the servers and not
> have to update the /etc/hosts file on all the machines ?  I know this is
> what DNS is supposed to do, but I've never used it that way.

If you statically assign the IP addresses, then it wouldn't have to be
updated except when a server is changed/added/removed.  I've done this in
the past with scripts that can be scheduled to run on each machine that
pull a master hosts file from a designated main server, but it's far less
reliable and desirable than running DNS.

> Furthermore, my DNS server would be the local router, not a dedicated PC,
> unless we changed that too.

You would normally set up a DNS server to provide local name resolution and
set it to go to your external DNS servers for addresses outside your local
domain.  (It gets a lot trickier with "split DNS" if you're running your
own outward-facing DNS server, but you're not doing that now, so don't
start.)

Cheers,
--
	Dave Ihnat
	dihnat at dminet.com