Re: Resolving Host Names

Malcolm Ripley <mripley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Could someone explain how to fix the two problems I have. First the
situation:
[snip]

All the windows stuff works fine and they all talk to one another,
file sharing, printer sharing etc etc

Problem 1
How do I name my RiscPC and get this to be seen on my router?

Problem 2
When I do a Ping ripleyserver on my RiscPC it says unknown host.
However, when I do ping 192.168.0.8 this works. So how do I get host
names to resolve on my RiscPC?

OK, so what's happening is everyone is using the router as the DNS server
(including the Risc PC, which will pick it up by DHCP even if you didn't set
it explicitly). However the Windows stuff looks like it's also using WINS
to pick up each other's names (it's one of Microsoft's attempts at plug and
pray for networks). That means the Windows stuff can see each other by
name, but this information isn't being passed on to the router which is
providing the DNS server. The DNS server on the router doesn't know the
names of any machine[1] so can't provide that if anyone asks.

[1] There is, AIUI, space in the DHCP protocol for machines to say 'my name
is XXXX and I'd like an address please' but I'm not sure if this is
implemented here.

What you need to find out is whether your router can accept you manually
adding DNS entries. It'll probably allow you to set up a list of mappings
between IP addresses and names. For this to work you need to set up a
mapping between MAC addresses and IP addresses on the router (in the DHCP
configuration somewhere).

The idea is that when the specified MAC address belonging to your Risc PC
(say) asks for an IP address via DHCP it'll be given a fixed IP address.
This fixed address can then be looked up in the DNS to map to the name of
the Risc PC.

So you're still using DHCP but the machines you've specified always get the
same addresses. You can, however, add other machines to the network which
will just pick a 'random' address by DHCP.

I would be grateful of an explanation of some of the settings in the
RiscOS network configuration windows even if not applicable to my
problem as I intend to document all this stuff in HTML format with
nice pictures of the configuration windows. I will then post this on
my website for all to access!

I'll leave that to someone else - is there something the various RISC OS
networking guides on the net have not already covered?

Theo
.

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