Tim wrote:
On Fri, 2006-06-30 at 13:38 +0800, Deepak Shrestha wrote:
I have fedora core 5 installed in one of my computer in LAN. One of
the windows machine acts as the web server (internal) for the LAN but
I can't figure out how to get the web page served by that machine in
my fedora. Just typing the hostname (http://hostname) doesn't work, I
have to put the IP address to see the page. What's wrong with DHCP
setting? and how to fix this?
By the way all computers in my LAN have dynamic address which is
handled by DSL modem router. Other windows machine is behaving
correctly, only fedora installation is not. What do I need to do? I
also checked the network settings and found nothing to do with that as
it has all automatic option checked.
Okay, why and how does it work with the other machines? Do they have
their own hosts file with the webserver's numerical IP and named
addresses? (Not a good idea with dynamic DHCP-set addresses, but fine
if you set your DHCP server to always provide the same addresses to the
same machine - static addressing.) Is Windows doing some other
tomfoolery to try and figure out name resolution?
Does your modem/router's DHCP server update a DNS server with the
addresses, and are all your computers configured to use that DNS server?
They should all be configured to use the same DNS server, but it's been
my experience that modem/routers don't act as a local DNS servers for
the machines that they dole out addresses to using DHCP. Say what model
modem/router you have, someone might know how it works, in particular.
In my case, I don't use my modem/router as neither my DHCP nor DNS
servers, I do that on a Fedora-running PC behind it. I can control a
computer-based server exactly how I want to, the router controls are
very limited.
I'm not an expert, but by how I've always understood it, Windows
machines use DNS entries, hosts file entries, and *NetBIOS* name
broadcasts to look up other computers. So, your hostname on your windows
webserver is found by the other windows machines because they're looking
up the NetBIOS name, but Linux doesn't search NetBIOS to find IP
addresses. I bet if you did an 'nmblookup hostnamehere' (where
hostnamehere is the name of the windows box), the Linux computer would
be able to find it. The way to fix that is to do what others are
suggesting and either give the windows server a static IP (which is
usually suggested for a server) or to get the DHCP server to register
the computer with a DNS server.
Hope this clarifies your problem.
Justin Willmert
