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In order to test my web development work, I've setup a Linux VM on my computer. I'm using Adapter Bridging (instead of NAT) so that I don't have to worry about setting up port forwarding. It works well; the VM receives an IP Address and is able to access the network.

I mainly access the VM via SSH. However the IP Address has the potential to change since my work uses DHCP. I don't want to have to update my "hosts" file on my Windows PC every time. Instead, I'd like the Linux VM to simply "broadcast" its hostname over the local Windows network just like Windows machines do.

I thought that installing Samba would accomplish this, but either I was wrong, or there's some configuration I've yet to do before this can be accomplished.

I don't have access to the router that assigns the IP addresses, so I'm hoping to find some way to modify the Linux/Samba config to simply broadcast the hostname (or have the Linux host respond to requests for that hostname on the network).

How can I accomplish this? Thanks!

Note: I'm using Fedora 13.

Brian Lacy
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2 Answers2

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What you are probably trying to talk about is the Dynamic DNS registration Windows does. This has nothing to do with Samba, and messing around with your Samba configurations will not change anything.

If the DNS servers happen to allow registration requests from unauthenticated clients then you would can use nsupdate to register your IP. If the Windows DNS server requires authentication, you are going to have to join your box to the domain and get nsupdate-gss working.

See this related question which has a script sample that performs the DNS update request.

Community
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Zoredache
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  • This sounds like it might work, but it's a bit more complicated than I want to deal with at the moment. I'm marking it the best answer because, assuming it works, it probably is. I'll post my own solution in a moment. – Brian Lacy Nov 05 '10 at 14:21
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I've had some friends that tried to make Linux and Windows DHCP/DNS work nicely together but it always turns out bad. They ended up just getting with the networking group and have them set DHCP reservations and manual DNS entries. I know that's not the answer you were looking for but just wanted to post my experiences.