zephod@xxxxxxxxxx wrote on Sunday 21 October 2007: > Here is my simple and, I suspect, very common setup: 2 PCs, one FC6 > Linux, one Windows Vista and a Linksys wireless router. A DHCP server > on the Linksys determines the IP addresses of the 2 machines. > My question is: is it possible for either machine to ping the other > without having to make an entry in its local hosts file? At least not only with DHCP. It is only for assigning IP addresses and parameters to network devices. If you want name-to-address resolving you need (an internal) DNS server. That could be your Linksys router. I don't know if the original firmware has a DNS server, but WRT54G is flashable. That means you can install a small Linux distro on it and within a DNS server (dnsmasq or bind or ...). Look here http://www.freewrt.org/trac/wiki/Documentation/TargetSystems If you cannot use a DNS server you could use Bonjour/Zeroconf for address resolving. Apples Bonjour is available for Windows and Linux has its own implementations of the mDNS (multicast DNS) protocoll, e.g. mDNSresponder or avahi. mDNS is simmilar to DNS but it does not need a central server because every machine is sending broadcast messages on the network announcing itself to its neighbours. With help of the nss-mdns package you can then resolve the broadcasted names to IP addresses. For a small office the DHCP/DNS solution is the preferable one. -- bye, Adalbert Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking about nor whether what is said is true. -- Russell
