Hi,
I have a freshly installed SLES 11 server. It’s using dhcp one one card, and a static ip on another nic.
I get an ipaddress from dhcp - but when I do an nslookup, it doesn’t seem to be registered.
Can anyone point me somewhere to find out how this process is supposed to work - and how to fix it. I’ve tried google - it has a lot out there on the nameserver / dns server but not much I could see on how those entries get populated by clients.
Thanks.
If you are on a home LAN 99.99% you are getting an address inside what is called a private range. Those IP addresses have no domain names associated with them. But you can set up your own name server to give them convenient names on the LAN. The most frequently used name server software package is called BIND.
If you are on the public Internet, and you are getting IP addresses from your ISP, there are two mappings, forward and reverse. Your ISP is supposed to resolve the reverse mapping, from IP address to domain name, but sometimes they don’t. The forward mapping is usually done by your ISP’s nameservers. However you can register your own additional forward mappings with other registrars. In other words there can be more than one domain name that resolves to your IP address. If your address is dynamic, then you need a dynamic DNS registrar. Some simple registrar services (A records, MX records) can be had for free from DDNS registrars, but for a full range of services you need to pay. dyndns.org is one example of a DDNS registrar.
If you find it difficult to grasp what ken_yap is saying:
(1) Think about why you want such a binding between IP address and domain names.
(2) Instead of setting up complex “bind” etc., if it is for internal use, there are simpler alternatives like keeping entries in /etc/hosts file.
I appreciate the responses. To give a bit more detail, my department has a handful of SLES 11 servers. We have a private network between our handful of servers.
We also have a corporate network, mostly windows machines, that we are using dhcp to connect to.
I get an ip address, gateway etc returned to me. All the connectivity is good.
However, from other machines on the network, they do not know of this server by hostname. I can reach it by ipaddress directly. I could put the ip addresses in to the hosts file but that obviously causes a problem if dhcp gives out a new address at some point.
I’m trying to understand why the hostname of the server is not being registered with the nameserver - and how to fix it.
Are you the admin for these machines?