Blogging Without a Safety Net

Following on from looking at PXE based installs earlier on in the week, I then moved on to looking at integrating dynamic DNS updates into DHCP (see this article for more details), which is something else I’ve been meaning to look at for some time.

It does greatly simplify the setting of the hostname and domain name on a server when it’s been automatically installed with Debian pre-seeding or Red Hat’s kickstart over the network. This is because both build systems use the reverse DNS entry of the server’s IP address during installations as its hostname.

Thus the host entry in the DHCPd configuration becomes the single location for the details, as in the following example:

host test-001 {

  hardware ethernet 00:0c:29:56:f3:7b;

  option host-name "test-001";

  ddns-hostname "test-001";

  ddns-domainname "local";

}