[SGVLUG] How to manage DNS for DHCP-assigned clients?

[Adam Compton]

Emerson, Tom wrote:
>> -----Original Message----- Of Adam Compton
>>
>> I work at a small private school with ~200 client computers scattered 
>> around the campus. They all receive dynamic IP addresses from 
>> the DHCP server we have running.
>>
>> The question I have is this: how would you all keep track of where a 
>> given computer was on the network, so that it could be administered 
>> remotely and programmatically?
>>     
>
> Windows or Linux clients?
>
> If windows, you might want to look into "SMS", which is Microsoft's
> "System Management Server", which explicitly solves this problem.
> [disclaimer, "or so I'm lead to believe..." -- I've never actually used
> it myself]
>
>   
Mac OS X clients, actually. I'm comfortable enough with UNIX 
fundamentals to treat them as Linux/FreeBSD clients (no administration 
GUI necessary, for instance).
>> For instance, pushing out a new version of a certain configuration
>> file to each computer as soon as it comes on the network,
>>     
>
> What about pulling it from the clients?  Either in "if-up" [for Linux]
> or the user's "logon.bat" file [for windows using domain servers]  the
> script can query the server to see of what the server holds is "newer"
> than what it has, and if so, pulls it. [or always pulls it if you're
> paranoid...]
>   

That is one of the solutions I had considered, and using cfengine for 
updating configuration files was suggested in another reply. However, I 
would like the computers to have valid DNS names so that we could 
connect to them for one-offs, and also so that our logs were easier to 
parse. Some of our client machines are laptops that travel between 
physical subnets, so I don't think static IP addresses would serve in 
those cases.

Thank you very much for the ideas, though!

- Adam Compton