Mine the Harvest

(What to do this yourself? Check out the wiki how to for the DNS Sever and PXE server for Suse.)

The other day I came home and was needing to SSH into Syd’s Mac G4 and also RDP into one of my notebooks. As usual, I had forgetten their IPs or they had changed.

“You know, wouldn’t it be just super geeky to run my own DNS server at home so I didn’t have this problem?” I asked.

I then proceeded to discover that setting up a DNS server in Suse 11 is simplicity itself. Yast makes the process incredibly simple.

I also really love how Suse allows you to use Yast in the CLI – that makes adding records and zone files extremely easy. You can just SSH in and make any changes in Yast, very nice.

It took all of about :20 to get my DNS server up and running. Of course then I had to play around with it. I also learned how to set up my dhcp server to supply a search domain when it gives out leases and also have dhcp statically assign IPs to hosts based on MAC addresses. It all works perfectly and hosts get their resolv.confs just how I want. As a bonus I have the Suse server act as a PXE server so if I need to diag a system at home I can PXE boot it to a linux environment for troubleshoointg, etc.

Now, being the lazy guy I am, I can now just reach all hosts in my house as easy as. . .

Callandor:/ # ping linux
PING linux.house.com (192.168.2.3) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.2.3: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.050 ms
— linux.house.com ping statistics —
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.050/0.050/0.050/0.000 ms

Now that is what I like!