Small (SoHo) LAN, how to manage local DNS etc.?

[Marius Gedminas]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2012 at 10:49:38AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> What's the "Ubuntu" way to manage DNS etc. on a small Home/Office LAN?
> 
> I have a small LAN running at home with, at this precise moment, eight
> devices on the LAN.  These comprise (usually) three or four computers
> running xubuntu, a windows computer, a printer, a DECT phone base
> station and the NAT router that connects them all to the internet.
> 
> I need a manageable way to handle these by assigning IP addresses (i.e.
> DHCP) and providing name services (i.e. DNS) such that I can use names
> for the various systems.
> 
> So how should one manage this sort of a system?  I can run DHCP on the
> NAT router but that doesn't provide DNS for the LAN so I don't get names
> for my systems.

Why doesn't your NAT router provide DNS for the LAN?

> How do people handle this sort of thing?

Set up DNS on the router.

I believe home routers (at least newer ones) automatically export DHCP
names via DNS -- which works if your DHCP clients supply their names to
the DHCP servers.  I don't remember if Ubuntu does that; I remember that
the dhcp3-client package in Debian didn't used to do that a while ago.

Alternatively, all consumer home routers I've seen have a web interface
for assigning static IPs by MAC address and for defining local DNS name
-> IP mappings.  This is manual and tedious.

And of you've got a Linux box as your router (or, e.g. OpenWRT on your
embedded router box) you can dnsmasq on it to provide DNS and DHCP (with
static mappings defined by /etc/hosts and /etc/ethers).

Marius Gedminas
-- 
I would suggest re-naming "rmbdd()". I _assume_ that "dd" stands for "data
dependent", but quite frankly, "rmbdd" looks like the standard IBM "we
lost every vowel ever invented" kind of assembly lanaguage to me.
		-- Linus Torvalds
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