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View Full Version : Boincview, DHCP and DNS question



123bob
11-01-2007, 08:08 PM
I'm trying to use Boincview on the farm now. All the computers are fully contained on the LAN side of a Linksys router, on the home network. All devices are peers on this network, with a 48 port HP switch handling the amount of ports needed

I had tried to setup Boincview using the computer name of the managing computer, "el-machino-2". This was typed into the "remote_hosts.cfg" file per the instructions. The client machine could not resolve the hostname. Not surprising since there is no DNS server for it. I manually typed in the IP of the host machine and it found it OK. On the Boincview host side, I manually typed in all the IPs of the client machines since it also couldn't resolve the client computer names.

Everything was just peachy, with Boincview displaying the status of the entire farm on one screen. Cool. I was feeling pretty geeky until we had a power fail this afternoon. :mad: Well, guess what, when the power came back on, Boincview could no longer find the clients since they all got reassigned new addresses from the DHCP server on the router. I knew this was a risk in my setup. Now I gotta fix it.

The first option I can come up with is to kill DHCP and assign static IP addys to the entire LAN. Bummer since this presents the maintenance associated with it.

What I'd really like to do is to make the router serve as the DNS. It knows all the machine names and what dynamic IP it assigned, so it should be able to do it right? Not! My old linksys has some feature called Dynamic DNS which requires you to open an account on some DNS outfit on the WAN side of things. I don't think that would be ideal. I do not anticipate needing access to my farm from the WAN side. Or, am I being short-sighted? What are the security risks of doing this?

How do you guys handle this? Is there a router available that can do DNS? A program on the host PC? Or do you just use static IP?

Thanks for the help. Boincview is really cool, and I could get used to it real fast if I can overcome this setup issue.

Regards,
Bob

corruptor
11-01-2007, 08:45 PM
Depending on the router you can assign DHCP addresses as though they are static using the mac address of each network card, this way the machine always gets the same IP.

Simple DNS is a very nice little DNS server thats fairly inexpensive... runs on windows.. if you have linux boxen you have quite a few options for DNS, free and installed with almost all basic distros.

123bob
11-01-2007, 09:37 PM
Depending on the router you can assign DHCP addresses as though they are static using the mac address of each network card, this way the machine always gets the same IP.

Simple DNS is a very nice little DNS server thats fairly inexpensive... runs on windows.. if you have linux boxen you have quite a few options for DNS, free and installed with almost all basic distros.

Thx..

If I go the MAC route, will I then have the capability of the router automatically assigning DHCP to a potential "outsider" machine or will I have to know it's MAC? Thinking LAN party here.... I could test this easy enough I suppose...

Regards,
Bob

WesM63
11-01-2007, 09:54 PM
Thx..

If I go the MAC route, will I then have the capability of the router automatically assigning DHCP to a potential "outsider" machine or will I have to know it's MAC? Thinking LAN party here.... I could test this easy enough I suppose...

Regards,
Bob

Bob,
The router will still hand out DHCP addresses as normal. The MAC's in the list will be assigned a specific IP address. So say you input your main pc's mac, it will always get a specific IP address unless you change the nic in it. No other computer can get that IP address.

Its handy if your doing BT or something that requires a specific port open. This is how I have mine setup, my gaming rig always gets 192.168.20.63.

123bob
11-01-2007, 10:00 PM
Bob,
The router will still hand out DHCP addresses as normal. The MAC's in the list will be assigned a specific IP address. So say you input your main pc's mac, it will always get a specific IP address unless you change the nic in it. No other computer can get that IP address.

Its handy if your doing BT or something that requires a specific port open. This is how I have mine setup, my gaming rig always gets 192.168.20.63.

That sounds perfect!! Thanks Wes and corruptor! :toast:

I'll start the process right now. I would still like to hear if anyone else handles this differently. The best solutions always come from the most ideas....and this problem tweaked my engineering funny bone. :rofl: Ouch!

Regards,
Bob

brot
11-02-2007, 01:16 AM
And if you want your router working as it should you can still throw http://openwrt.org/ on it ;)

thats what i have here, and it works very well. dhcp and dns is provided by dnsmasq, which does a pretty good job.
(and thanks to openwrt my router is a fileserver too, as this asus wl500-gp has usb ;) )

SiGfever
11-02-2007, 02:19 PM
Bob,

The suggestions that you were given are very good. I do have one of my Win2K Advanced Servers doing DNS so it is not an issue. I assign all my main machines and printers static IP addresses and do DHCP from my lan and wireless routers for the notebooks and the wife's desktop machine in her office.

For me it just makes it easier to always have certain addresses static.