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Dynamically registering Unix/Linux hosts in DNS

An age-old problem in mixed IT environments is that Windows servers can register themselves dynamically in a (Windows) DNS server and Unix/Linux servers can't (easily).

Solaris has a way to fix this and I just discovered that Red Hat has one too. The RHEL 4 Reference Guide mentions adding the parameter DHCP_HOSTNAME in the ifcfg-eth# files. That will tell the DHCP client to specify a hostname when acquiring an IP address.

Another search led to the use of nsupdate which seems to register a Linux host using Kerberos in the AD so that it can update its hostname on future reboots.

I haven't tested both methods yet, but I will soon and let you know.

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