On Fri, 2006-03-10 at 22:57 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote: > On Friday 10 March 2006 21:18, Craig White wrote: > > computers and politics - hmmm...strange bedfellows ;-) > > > :-) > > I find that things are easiest when all 'workstations' use DHCP and I > > can make changes to dhcp which are automatically loaded at startup on > > the workstation machines (be they windows/macs/linux), then you can > > insert things like netbios-server (WINS) into their configuration > > without going to each machine and actually manually configuring it. > > > I've always like static IP myself - of course with just one server, half a > dozen workstations, and 4 laptops coming and going, it's a small enough lan > to manage that. > > > It's hard to justify taking the time and energy to remove NetBIOS on all > > the various systems and I probably wouldn't bother with it myself, and I > > suggested it merely because it is an option. > > > I'm always interested to hear of other people's ideas and experience. They > often lead me on to read things I wouldn't have found otherwise. ---- if you are really into the manual thing...you can use LMHOSTS and distribute the LMHOSTS file for each machine to import and they will know the ip address of each machine without any functional network browsing mechanism at all (i.e. browser elections and wins). LMHOSTS is the Windows way of /etc/hosts you will find these things in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc Manual things are too tough to maintain and fixed ip addresses work fine until things change and then you gotta do a loop around to all the computer systems which is time consuming. Network browsing, DNS, DHCP allow you to easily adapt for change. Craig
