Re: [cobalt-users] Qube 2 and @home networks

[Kris Dahl <kris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 2/18/00 2:16 PM, Chris Adams at chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 13:53:51 -0800, Kris Dahl wrote:
> 
>> the DHCP requiring identification.  DHCP isn't going to work for the Qube
>> more than likely due to their implementation.  I would quesiton any
>> implementation of dynamically assignment of static addresses.  Just one more
>> thing to complicate the situation.  THey also use some not oft-used parts of
>> DHCP to setup host name information, etc. so that you just have to type
>> 'mail' or whatever into your email client for SMTP instead of (for example)
> 
> That's DNS - mail works because your computer is a host in the specific
> subdomain and hosts can be resolved relative to that domain. My computer is
> in .elcjn1.sdca.home.com so a simple resolve for "mail" will get the proper
> mail.elcjn1.sdca.home.com. No DHCP necessary, which is fortunate because I
> have tried 2 widely separate locations, 4 computers, 5 NICs, Win95, Win98, NT
> 4.0, W2K, Linux, OS/2 and BeOS and DHCP has never once worked. This is
> apparently quite common as all of their techs have immediately done the
> "Yeah, that happens a lot. Here's the info to enter manually." routine.

This is true that you can set up to resolve for the domain like that, but
its not the case in how it is setup at @home.  The DNS doesn't actually
resolve back to an IP address.  If you perform an Nnslookup, you get
nothing.  There is no such host as mail.home.com (for example--as the DNS
was setup).  There is actually some fairly obscure stuff you can do with
DHCP to do stuff like this.  With DHCP you can set like the default homepage
of the client, set the time server, even do some interesting hosts type
emulation which is what they appear to be doing.  Kinda weird.

Makes it really hard to use the management interface without using DHCP.

-k