LincolnBlogs

That’s what I call my internal network, linc.lan.. Before I moved I had an extensive network with a number of hand-rolled services like bind and dhcp and mail and the like. After I moved, I pretty much just folded and used the default services provided to me by my little belkin wireless router. The real problem with that, though, is that is has a crappy dhcp implementation. This is something that has been plaguing me for 2 months now. The belkin dhcp works, albeit a little slow, but it assigns itself as an authoritative nameserver. As far as I can tell, this little thing does not do dns, or just forwards it really slowly. So what happens is that you get the appearance of websites being very slow to respond because you have to time your way through the first dns entry of the belkin router before getting to a working dns server. Now since I have been wickedly busy lately, I had just turned to bypassing all this problem by assigning static IP’s to my most used machines. After all, no dhcp, and the dns entries in /etc/resolv.conf never get chnged to include that silly belkin right? Well, this morning, since nobody else is up and it’s too rainy to do anything else (and nice and quiet) I quickly set up a *real* dhcp service on my local server and turned off dhcp on the belkin. Wow, I should have done this long go. My addresses are assigned lightning fast and they are assigned a search path on my local lan (for when I get the time to set bind (local dns) up.

For those of you who haven’t set anything like this up before, it’s really simple. I think the best tutorial I can find right now it at Ubuntu’s Wiki. Give it a look there and set yourself up. You will thank yourself later. I know I will anyway!