Dynamic Host DNS Registration

[Jim Logan]

Sten Carlsen wrote:

> I just spotted another piece of trouble coming your way:
>
> If you have or ever think of having a MAC or certain other things in 
> your network: DON'T ever use .local as your local TLD-name. .local has 
> a special meaning for MACs (basic building block in "rendevouz", MAC 
> version of UPNP). Use anything else like .lan, .home, .xyz, ...; if 
> you have an external domain name, use that internally as well.
>
> I learnt this the hard way; it took me a couple of days to get 
> anything to work on my brand new MAC. I switched from .local to .home. 
> There is a surprisingly large number of places that needs to change.

Thanks for the advice!  I probably would have used .local!  That should 
be in an FAQ somewhere, indexed with common keywords so people like me 
will find it easily, by accident.

Maybe I will take your advice and try using my external domain name, 
even though it's long.  I can't think of any place I'll need to type it 
very often, besides when I'm testing with the dig command.  <sigh/> More 
playing with sendmail configs after I make the change... :-(

BTW, here's an update on my original question.  I went ahead and put a 
DHCP server on the same machine as my DNS server.  I had to play around 
with the configuration files for the servers and my PC clients, but I 
finally got everything working.  One thing that gave me a lot of grief 
is the WinXP DNS setting, "DNS setting for this connection".   After I 
deleted that field, everything started working.

-Jim