localhost or LAN addresses in /etc/hosts

[Bart Silverstrim]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Chris G wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 02:44:28PM -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> 
>>> No, that's just the ONE place you have to do things.  In the time
>>> you've been asking us how to do this with a piece of software that
>>> you had to add to your system, I could have done the setup dozens of
>>> times on a router.
>>>
>> ... and, similarly, I could have done it by editing /etc/hosts.
> 
> If you _could_ you wouldn't have  been asking here. 

I think the important thing at this particular point is to have everyone 
just stop and review what the actual question is and what the options 
are and then go from there. It sounds almost like now Chris (you're the 
original poster, yes?) wanted a setup on a small network for DHCP 
and...what? Making sure particular machines had the same IP every time? 
Making sure they have particular DNS names? What is it exactly you're 
trying to do on your network?

There are twelve ways to do things on any given network and if you 
really want to do it the old fashioned way, give every device you will 
constantly use a static IP, set up your Linux box as a DNS caching 
server with your internal records authoritative for your internal IP's 
and forwarding non-internal requests to your external DNS, and you'll 
speed up your DNS searches in addition to having network names set up. 
Set up DHCP for whatever block you want visitors to use, document your 
network map, and you should be good to go. Would that work?

I'm sure I'm missing what additional functionality you're looking for, 
but this is a simple way to add the services that have been being hashed 
in the thread for awhile here...