Home network and domain

From: Stefan Monnier (monnier_at_iro.umontreal.ca)
Date: 04/04/04 

Date: Sun, 04 Apr 2004 21:56:01 GMT

Like many people, I have a couple of computers at home, connected together
via a switch+router.
All my IP addresses are of the form 192.168.1.X.

Now, I often want to access one machine from the other for example for
login (via SSH) or for file-sync (via Unison) or for time-keeping (via NTP)
or for printing (via IPP), ...

When I want to do that currently I have two problems:
1 - each machine is only known from the other as "192.168.1.103" instead of
    some symbolic name. That's ugly.
2 - The DHCP server does not even always give the same IP number, so
    a machine can be known as 192.168.1.103 at some point and 192.168.1.104
    the next day.

I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation. What do other people do?
Oh, and one last thing: none of the computers is "a server", i.e. other than
the router, nothing is guaranteed to be up all the time (so I can't run
a DNS server on one of the machines, for instance).

I see three paths:
1 - use static IP instead of DHCP. That's inconvenient because I then have
    to change it everytime I move a machine from my net to my work's net.
2 - get another cheap/old computer and set it up as a DHCP+DNS server
    (DHCP so that it can dynamically serve static IPs, which my router's
    DHCP server sadly doesn't know how to do).
3 - get a better router whose DHCP server can serve static IPs (i.e. you can
    configure it with a list of MAC->IP mappings). Ideally it would also
    come with a DNS server which could be configured to provide names for
    the served IPs. Or maybe it could just use normal DHCP with a DNS
    server that can be configured with a MAC->name mapping.
4 - Use some scripts in /etc/network/if-up.d that would download the DHCP
    client table via http from the router and setup /etc/hosts accordingly.
    Alternatively, it could ping all of 192.168.1.X and then use `arp'
    to get the data. Problem is: the client table may very well change
    after the ifup command and we won't know about it, so we'll have to
    assume that the table doesn't change much and/or refresh the table
    in a cron job.

Has anybody tried number 4? Does anybody know of a router suitable
for number3? Does anybody use something yet different?

        Stefan

Relevant Pages

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