DHCP on external router (D-Link DI-624), DNS on Fedora

[Tim]

On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 13:51 -0500, Bruce Feist wrote:
> Ultimate goal: Get Samba, email, and httpd working on a Fedora-based 
> system, serving a home network.  The network is masqueraded to the 
> outside world through an IDSL connection; the Fedora box serves as the 
> gateway, and there's a separate D-Link DI-624 unit which routes 
> non-server traffic to the internet using a cable connection, 
> independantly of the Fedora box.

You'd need for your router to be quite configurable/customisable, for
its DHCP server to do more than you can do with Linux.

For instance, a friend has a different brand one, it's got its own DHCP
server, but *all* it seems to do is dole out IP addresses.  There's no
entering of local machine names into a local DNS server, etc.

> Right now, the DI-624 is the DHCP server.  I don't fully understand the 
> relationship between it and DNS; I'd like to have either the 624 or the 
> Fedora box act as a local name server.  Does the 624 broadcast 
> information about every address assignment which the Fedora system can 
> pick up?  Is it the responsibility of the individual computers on the 
> network to broadcast their name and address information?  Or, is there 
> no way for the DNS server to deal with the DHCP-allocated names?  Do I 
> need to have Fedora do the DHCP serving instead of the 624?  I'm confused.

DHCP server doles out addresses according to your configuration of it.
They can also update a DNS server with that information.  Some routers
have a feature to provide your public IP address to something like
dyndns.org, but I've not heard of one that lets you configure it to
inform an internal DNS server of what it's up to.

Individual machines will just accept and use their addresses, they don't
then inform something else of their details to be databased.  Sure you
could make them do that (same as you can make a computer do almost
anything), but I don't think it'd be a normal thing.

Assuming that your router knows how to do its routing job properly with
static IPs (i.e. ones not under it's control), and I expect that it can,
it should also be able to handle routing traffic when something else has
set dynamic IPs.  I would use one of your Linux boxes as the DHCP server
and DNS server, integrating the two of them together.  It's quite easy
to do.  So long as you don't mind having that Linux box always running.

If you don't want a Linux box running all the time, then let the router
do all the work, and live with any limitations in features it may have.

> I think that I should be using split DNS, but that seems kind of messy 
> without built-in support in bind.  Are there any plans for bind to be 
> enhanced to understand DNS splitting, so that a single DNS process could 
> take care of both internet and local requests?

It can already do that, as far as I understand what you're describing.
"Views" allows it to serve addresses as the results for the same
queries, depending on where the requests come from.

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