dhcp & dns

Beeing on a LAN the inside of a shared Intenet adress, I use the router Netgear dg814 (NAT + other stuff gw/fw).

This one will automagically update dyndns with the shared host and domain name. Furthermore it has a dhcp server that will allow clients on the inside to get dynamic IP adresses.

DNS quries to the outside works very fine since the dhcp forwards the DNS server IP it got when first connected to the DSL node point.

BUT looking up inside adresses is a nightmare. I don't know for sure if the GW can act as a DNS server by itself and use the "attached divice list" some how. One mashine on the inside acts a NIS server and could distribute this information in turn if not.

But to keep the "attached divice list" in the GW updated, one has to modify the file /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf with the entry:

send host-name "yourhostname";

This will make the dhcp client inform the dhcp server of it's hostname. Note that the string is sent "as is" (it would be much nicer if we could get it to send the actual hostname instead).

Additional hints:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/255
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/343