On 7/12/2011 9:19 PM, Emmett Culley wrote: > how > are we to manage the DNS server? It is NOT trivial to create and > manage DNS records with a text editor. If editing BIND zone files is too complex for you or it's just overly complex for your situation, I recommend switching to dnsmasq. It combines DNS and DHCP in a single easy-to-configure daemon. Instead of zone files, it uses /etc/hosts. In addition to being simpler to configure than either BIND or ISC dhcpd, the fact that it combines DNS and DHCP in the same server means "ping mylaptop" does what you expect. That is to say, there's an automatic DNS association created when a client gets a DHCP lease, based on the name the client uses to identify itself. You can configure ISC dhcpd to make it tell BIND the name-to-IP mapping for each lease it hands out, but you don't get that for free: http://www.semicomplete.com/articles/dynamic-dns-with-dhcp/ It's a fine article, but compared to "it works out of the box", it's really no contest, for the humble small office or home user.