As a person who switched to openSUSE from Ubuntu, I find it really mind boggling that host name resolution has been overlooked in such a big way. I’ve been messing around with linux and windows based systems for over a decade now and the necessity of hard-programming hostnames into /etc/hosts really annoys me. I’ve poured through all the posts in this forum regarding host name resolution and every single “solution” has proven to be unsuccessful.
My current setup is simple.
My main gateway is a WRT54g v3 running DD-WRT v24 SP1
The machines sitting inside the network are:
Homebuilt x64 box with gigabit adapter and wifi adapter (unused)
Dell XPS m1330 with Intel 4965 wifi adapter and 10/100 ethernet (unused)
Sony Vaio VGN-s460 with Intel 2200bg adapter and 10/100 ethernet (unused)
All of these machines were able to resolve eachother with 0 problems (regardless of service) in Ubuntu and Windows. Now with openSUSE 11.0 none of the machines can see eachother, the router DHCP table has an “*” in place of the hostname. nslookup, traceroute and ping all fail to resolve the hostname. All boxes are able to be pinged and accessed via IP address and all resolve internet domains properly. None of the machines have the firewall enabled.
My main reason for switching to openSUSE was the robustness of the power management. My machines operate perfectly standalone (except for some problems with Pulseaudio). However, network wise, the hassle of having to lookup each machine’s IP address once the lease expires makes me want to pull my hair out.
I don’t want to setup a dedicated DNS/DC server, I don’t want to use Static IPs; I want to retain my WRT54g as the solitary DC/DNS and have everything work in a dynamic matter since I have guests quite often that want to jack into my network and use my available services (SSH/SFTP, Samba (netbios), NFS, etc.)
I really don’t want to switch back to Ubuntu, b/c I really enjoy openSUSE, however this issue really has me torn. Any advice not covered in the other threads would be greatly appreciated.