Getting DHCP to 'update' DNS records locally

[John Nielsen]

On Thursday 29 November 2007, Clint Olsen wrote:
> Apologies if this isn't the correct forum.  I'd like to configure DNS on
> my home network but make it work simultaneously with DHCP.  So, when
> hosts are plugged into the network and issued an IP, DNS is updated to
> reflect the hostnames.  That way I can refer to all my machines by name
> in all databases and I can avoid hardcoding IP addresses.  I know Windows
> allows name-based recognition even in the instance you're using DHCP, but
> I'd like it to work more generally with any type of machine on the
> network.
>
> The problem is, when I search for terms related to this, I get hits for
> DynDNS and all that stuff which is /not/ what I want.  I'm not trying to
> update a remote DNS record.  This is just a local thing.
>
> If there's a lightweight DNS server that comes with a DHCP daemon, that
> would be fine too.  I just need to know where to start.

You can do this fairly easily with isc-dhcp3-server and bind/named. The 
dhcpd.conf(5) manpage (from isc-dhcp3-server) goes into quite a bit of 
detail on how to set this up (including what to put in named.conf).

JN