Hello all, I'm testing a home LAN server inside Virtualbox - figured it'd be easier to build (and fix) things inside a virtual sandbox first, and then migrate over to a physical install once I have most of the kinks worked out. The host OS is Windows Vista; the guest OS will be various Linux distributions for education/entertainment purposes. First, a little explanation on the 'lay of the land': The first virtual machine is a gateway/router box running CentOS 5.4. The 'outward' facing NIC is eth0, and it picks up an IP through the NAT interface provided by Virtualbox. That part seems to be working fine at the moment. The VM has CentOS 5.4 installed, downloaded and installed updates, and can browse the web, etc. The 'internal' network adapter (eth1) is connected to a virtual LAN 'intnet' that is otherwise not accessible from the 'outside' world at this point. It has a static IP assigned (10.0.0.1/255.255.255.0), and dnsmasq is running. Here is the contents of /etc/dnsmasq.conf: domain-needed bogus-priv filterwin2k except-interface=eth0 dhcp-range=10.0.0.50,10.0.0.100,1h dhcp-host=asmodean dhcp-host=demandred dhcp-host=lanfear dhcp-authoritative conf-dir=/etc/dnsmasq.d and here is the contents of /etc/hosts: 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost ::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 10.0.0.1 rahvin.local rahvin 10.0.0.2 asmodean.local asmodean 10.0.0.3 demandred.local demandred 10.0.0.4 lanfear.local lanfear What I *want* to happen is to be able to give a fixed dhcp lease to a client that sends a particular name from /etc/hosts - that way I just have to maintain /etc/hosts on the gateway/router box for local DNS, and I don't have to fiddle around finding and recording and entering the MAC addresses for each network card on each machine (actually easier on a 'virtual' lan than in real life, but still a minor PITA). I got the idea from this clause in the original dnsmasq.conf file: # Enable the address given for "judge" in /etc/hosts # to be given to a machine presenting the name "judge" when # it asks for a DHCP lease. #dhcp-host=judge The specific problem I'm having is that of the virtual 'clients', only one of them is getting assigned an IP address from the list in /etc/hosts. 'asmodean', running Ubuntu 9.10 gets its IP address of 10.0.0.2 as planned. The other two, demandred (running F12+LXDE) and lanfear (running Debian 5.03 Lenny), get randomly assinged IP addresses from the pool defined in dnsmasq.conf (10.0.0.50-10.0.0.100) like one would normally expect for a *dynamically* assigned lease. Except I wanted them to get fixed leases based on /etc/hosts. I've looked at most everything I can think of on both hosts... it doesn't seem to much matter if I set the hostname to 'demandred.local' or just 'demandred'. I'm not sure how to tell if the clients are sending that information in their requests? Any other ideas or suggestions? I realize the problem may not be strictly with the CentOS box, but any help would be greatly appreciated. TIA, Monte