Networking with Airport

N

Nosh

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Hello all. I recently purchased an Airport Base Station. Excited yet? :) I have my boring ol' cablemodem plugged into its WAN port, and a Netgear five-port switch in its LAN port. I'm currently setting up with it a PowerBook G4/800 (airport), a generic PC (LAN) and an HP Officejet D145 all-in-one (LAN). Now, everything works, and everything is set up dynamically. But I've given everything its own host name, and neither computer can communicate with each other or with the printer by using the host name, only IP. I could move to a static IP type structure, but i don't really want to with Airport :) Any suggestions?

Nosh
 
I am running on static IP's with my tibook and G4 iMac. I just find it easier, I am not running a printer just yet but I am using remote desktop, (to control my stereo) and it is very helpful
 
Alright, but can you communicate with them using their Computer Name or their IP address? I've decided to use static too, but I REALLY *REALLY* want to use hostnames :)


Nosh
 
an alternative way to make your machines understand hostnames is to set up a name server on your LAN
 
But that would require a computer to be on all the time, no? I've set up an SMC router for a friend's office with a printer and four computers, and they communicate using DHCP with hostnames just fine, and I HAD a Siemens broadband router with the exact same software before I got the Apple base station and I couldn't use hostnames then either. Am I missing something?

Nosh
 
it is possible that your friends SMC router can pass out hostnames as it acts as a DHCP server. the DHCP protocol allows this. however i have never seen a home broadband router do this, only a cisco where i used to work. i have familiarity with some netgear, asante, linksys, and apple home routers, and i don t think any of them passes out hostnames, though i could be wrong.

so assuming you don t have a router that passes out hostnames via DHCP, you have two options: use an external (to the router) server. yes that would require it to be always on. it could be a DHCP server that you configure to hand out hostnames, or it could be a DNS server that would map the local LAN IPs to hostnames. or you could configure each machine to recognize IP by hostname by editing its /etc/hosts file or equivalent (NetInfo in the case of OSX). this approach has the disadvantage of lacking centralized control, but for a small home network, that should still be OK. you could possibly centralize a little more by making a NIS or NetInfo network.
 
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