On Sat, 30 Dec 2017 20:51:42 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> The problem is there are more than one strategy you can use, and its
> lttle to do with a raspberry pi and a whole lot about designing and
> configuring a private IP network.
>
Possible approaches. These are all ways to attach names to the things on
your local network, i.e. give a unique name to your router, PCs, RPis,
network-attached printer(s) etc. When reading the following, note that my
LAN is all wired, so I haven't tried any of this with wifi.

1) some DHCP systems will let you assign a name and IP address to
   every device (PC, RPi, printer, router...) attached to your network.

   Whether this would work for you depends on the DHCP server. Yes, there
   is usually one in an ADSL modem/router but not all of them support
   an ability to link a name to an IP address and, unless it will allow
   you to configure it with the hardwired ID of the network chip, you'll
   need to assign a fixed IP to everything on the network.

2) Don't use DHCP at all: configure everything to use a static IP
   address. This is done by editing a text file, /etc/hosts by extending
   it to include the name and IP of everything on your LAN and then
   putting a copy of that file on every PC and RPi on you network.

   This is used as a lookup table to convert the hostname into an IP and
   then connect to the IP.

   This is simple to do, but tiresome to manage if there are more than
   4-5 machined on the LAN

3) Don't use DHCP at all: decide which is the master PC or RPi on your
   LAN, ideally something that runs 24x7, and set up a DNS server on it
   as the authoritative source for IP addresses for your LAN. Effectively
   you give it the same information as goes into /etc/hosts if you use
   solution (2) but now its only held in one place.

   This probably has the steepest learning curve of the three, but
   requires the least maintenance.

   The most commonly used DNS servers are called 'bind' and 'unbound',
   and are standard packages for almost all Linux versions, so
   installation is dead simple: its just getting the moderately complex
   configuration right that has the learning curve.

> This isn't hard, but its not trivial for a beginner.
>
Of the above, I'd say (2) is easiest to understand. (3) is probably the
hardest, and (1) might be easy, hard or not do what you want: it all
depends on which DHCP support is in your router and/or of you decide to
install the Linux DHCP package.

My router is configured to be invisible from the outside and to support
unnamed/visitor's devices via DHCP. Everything that is permanently
resident on my LAN has a fixed IP address. I run bind, the DNS server, on
my 24x7 house server to provide a naming service for permanent LAN
residents.

HTH


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie
          | dot org

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05