Why is adding a new Ubuntu PC to an existing LAN such a pain?

[Garry Knight]

ruscook wrote:

> You put the MAC address of the machine in the DHCP config file. So when it
> hands out leases it ALWAYS hands the same IP to the same machine

Which leads me to something I've never understood. I tell my router to do
this so that I can put the name and IP of each machine in /etc/hosts.
Otherwise, how can you access another machine by name? My machines know
their hostname and so does the router. My machines also know their own
domainname but the router doesn't as there's nowhere to configure it in the
router setup. So, if I don't put the machine names and IPs in /etc/hosts,
when I try to ping one of my machines by name, some machine out on the
Internet gets pinged instead.

How do other people set up DHCP yet still manage to ping machines on the LAN
by name? Am I overlooking something?

-- 
Garry Knight
garryknight at gmx.net