Win98 Client Setup

[Bob Vance]

>a network technician at school who told me that windows 95 can't
>recognize DNS servers from other platforms

That's a totally false statement.
How else would you find www.yahoo.com -- the root servers certainly
aren't running Win95!! :)
Who knows what he actually meant, though.

Anyhoo,

I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here, but let's say that you
want to be able to use DNS for your local net when you're not connected
and to still be able to resolve www.yahoo.com when you *are* connected.

One solution would be to use

    forwarders {
        1.2.3.4 ;  // ISP's nameserver
    };
    forward only;

in your Linux DNS set up and then point your Win95 box to that
Linux box for nameserver (and *not* the ISP's).

Then you must put some kind of NAT (Network Address Translation)
software on the Win95 box for "Internet sharing", to give the Linux box
access to the Internet thru the Win95 box.

I use Nat32 (www.nat32.com), an inexpensive and capable piece of
software.

Another solution would be to use one of your Linux boxes to connect
to the Internet.  Linux comes with NAT capability via 'ipchains'
(for kernels 2.2.x), but the learning curves for 'ipchains' and 'ppp'
setup on Linux are fairly steep.

In my setup, I have an old, Win95 Pentium 100 dedicated to running Nat32
and making the dial-up connection to the Internet.
Then, I have a Linux box (actually 2, one secondary :) running DNS and
DHCP.
This DNS is master for my local domain, and uses "forwarders" to the
dedicated Nat32 box, which supports DNS forwarding, so that it will
support external lookups.

All my Win9x clients get TCP/IP setup info from the DHCP and the
"domain-name-servers" in that info points to the Linux boxes.


-------------------------------------------------
Tks        | <mailto:BVance at sbm.com>
BV         | <mailto:BobVance at alumni.caltech.edu>
Sr. Technical Consultant,  SBM, A Gates/Arrow Co.
Vox 770-623-3430           11455 Lakefield Dr.
Fax 770-623-3429           Duluth, GA 30097-1511
=================================================





-----Original Message-----
From: bind-users-bounce at isc.org [mailto:bind-users-bounce at isc.org]On
Behalf Of BryanL123
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 12:03 AM
To: comp-protocols-dns-bind at moderators.isc.org
Subject: Win98 Client Setup


Hey all,

I currently have a three-computer network set up.  THere are two boxes
with RH
Linux 7 and one with win95.  One of the linux machines is configured
with bind
as a DNS server.  It works correctly with nslookup and ping by name on
the
linux clients, but not the windows one.  I can't ping by name, which
indicates
it isn't connecting to the DNS server. In fact, the win machine doesn't
even
send information across the network.  I've been using tcpdump to monitor
this,
but the win machine doesn't send any packets.

Now for the twist.  When ever I sign on to the internet on the windows
machine,
my DNS works fine.  I can do everything by name, instead of IP.  I think
something must be wrong with my configuration settings.  Right now, I
just go
to the tcp/ip properties in windows and add the ip of the DNS server,
the
domain, and the hosts.  Is there something else I'm missing?

I spoke with a network technician at school who told me that windows 95
can't
recognize DNS servers from other platforms and that all names must be
resolved
manually in a file called \windows\hosts (win version of /etc/hosts).
However,
many linux experts online have told me that the platforms are completely
compatible since they both use TCP/IP.  Can anyone point me in the right
direction.  Sorry for the long post.

Thanks in advance,
Bryan