[dundee] SOHO networking question

[Fionnbar Lenihan]

I've been using Linux for a few years as a client machine with
Networking limited to filling in the blanks in KPPP.

Recently got ADSL at home and we fitted a hardware ADSL Modem / router /
DHCP server / Firewall thingy (D-Link DSL-504).

My Linux laptop (mandrake 9.1), my wife's Win 98 Desktop are connected
by ethernet (wired) and get their settings via DHCP.  Another port on
the router is taken up with a wireless access point and this provides
connectivity to another Win 98 machine upstairs.

All works OK as far as sharing the ADSL connection goes.

I would like to eventually set up a SAMBA server on a redundant machine
for backups and printer and filesharing. Planning to use linux for this
but thought I would "practice" by running Samba on my own laptop first
then add a separate machine. Samba is installed on my laptop and I have
the appropriate GUI tools (SWAT and Webmin) on my system.

My problem is that every explanation of either NFS shares or SAMBA
shares assumes you can give SAMBA a fixed IP at which to find the
clients and correspondingly for the clients. 

As I understand it DHCP occasionally changes IP addresses for no reason
so there would be no point in me running upstairs and doing ipconfig on
my wife's windows machine and putting the result into the configuration.

I appreciate the mailing list is not the place for a "noddies guide to
networking" but would be grateful if people could maybe explain this
particular point or direct me to a resource. All the stuff I googled
assume that you have a linux computer acting as DHCP server rather than
a black box on a shelf.

Cheers

Fionnbar