Linux in a Windows Workstation Environment, Part II: Local Network Support
Tuesday, March 15 2005 @ 11:45 PM EST Contributed by: glosser
We carried part one of this series long ago. Here is part two from the Linux Journal.
This article series covers the development of a Linux-based server that supports a number of workstations running the Microsoft Windows operating system in the computer laboratory of a 55+ RV Resort in Mesa, Arizona. Part I covered the background of our organization, the establishment of our Linux system and the rules for our iptables firewall. This article covers network functions such as IP address serving, a cache-only name server, an intranet Web server and print and file services using the service message block (SMB) protocol.
DHCP Server
As noted in the previous article, our computer lab is connected to the Internet by way of a T1 line, which is shared with the business and sales offices and the Wi-Fi connections of the RV resort, all of which share a single IP address. An upstream router handles the necessary network address translation (NAT) to and from non-routable addresses in the 10.10.x.0 networks. Before installation of our firewall, all machines in the computer lab were assigned addresses on the 10.10.4.0 net. Now, only the external interface of the firewall belongs to that network. The internal address of the firewall, the printers, all of the computers in the lab and any laptops temporarily connected to the network are assigned addresses of the form 10.10.10.x. The firewall/server interface has a fixed address of 10.10.10.1, and the printers are fixed at 10.10.10.253 and 10.10.10.254. All other machines get their IP addresses from the DHCP server running on the Linux system. For ease of maintenance, I prefer to control the addresses of the desktop computers. Thus, our DHCP control file assigns fixed addresses based on the MAC address of the client.
The DHCP server in the SuSE distribution is controlled by the file etc/dhcpd.conf. An annotated listing of part of our file is shown below. The first statement defines the name for the network. This name is registered; however, no external DNS entries point to this system. Its use here, therefore, is fictitious.
