Hosts and their IP

[Trevelyan]

(First of all - I’m not particularly experienced with using php. Feel free to explain things to me about it as if I’m very new)

Having DNS records stored is just impractical for where our FOG environment is. So we want to just be able to use IP to ping hosts or something.

Ss I understand it, the *hosts *table is populated with a host’s IP address. Why isn’t this used for pinging instead of the netbios hostname? I had a look at the php file for pinging and it looks like its to do with system overhead of making a ping call?

So my questions:

• Why are hostnames used instead of IPs - is it as above?
• When do IPs get stored and are they ever updated?
• Is this another thing that has been overhauled in trunkfog?

Cheers guys!

[Wayne Workman]

Does your environment use Static IPs ? Have machines that don’t report their name properly? Do you have DNS issues ?

Just asking why…

Anyways, my environment uses DHCP and I don’t know how clients would ever be pinged without nbios names.

But sometimes, I really would like to just turn off pinging… unless someone could tell me a really good reason why I shouldn’t.

[Wayne Workman]

Perhaps someone should create a plugin that communicates with Windows DHCP Server ?

[Trevelyan]

@Wayne-Workman

They aren’t static, but they do retain leases for a long time. At the campus here, the ICT services department control the DHCP server that gives our machines their IPs and the DNS servers. We have some control (over AD groups and users and group policies and - to a degree - our switches and physical infrastructure) but not when it comes to DHCP/DNS operation. So we are stuck with IPs.

Which is fine, we can find which PCs are which IPs. I would have thought that a host could identify itself when the FOG service first starts and update its record that way, but I wouldn’t have thought NetBIOS pinging was really the way to go for communication with hosts when IP and MAC addresses are used for everything else.