[dundee] SOHO networking question

[Andrew Clayton]

On Mon, 2003-10-20 at 13:03, Fionnbar Lenihan wrote:
> 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. 
> 

hmm... yeah.. this would probably be true.. it will work with a dynamic
IP of course, but if it changes your clients can no longer reach your
SAMBA and more drastically your NFS server.

Probably the best thing to do, is to give your samba/nfs server another
IP, from the RFC reserved IP address ranges, i.e

10.x.x.x/8
172.16.x.x - 172.32.x.x/16
192.168.0.x - 192.168.255.x/24

and also your clients IP's from the same range.

e.g on the server you can do this

ifconfig eth0:0 172.16.0.1 up

and on your clients

ifconfig eth0:0 172.16.0.2 up
ifconfig eth0:0 172.16.0.3 up
etc

stick those commands into a rc.local to keep the aliases across reboots.

All this assumes you don't want/need to connect to samba/nfs from
outside your network... which is probably the case.

 
> 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.
> 

hmm.. right.. windows of course :( someone else will need to tell you
how (or if it's even possible) to setup IP aliasing under windows ;)



> 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.
> 

In practise I doubt it will make much difference whats allocating the
IP's...


> Cheers
> 
> Fionnbar


--
Andrew