On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 08:04:37 -0700, A-B C. wrote:
> This weekend I'm going to set up DSL with a modem and Linksys 4-port router...
> for my computer and my wife's Win98 box.
>
> Why do I have to enter in resolv.conf:

You don't. Set your Slack box to be a DHCP client (use "netconfig", or
see / edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf. And yes, when you make any changes
to that file you can simply run "/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1" to apply them.)

> Dial-up PPP (KPPP in KDE) seems to put entries in that file for me. Won't a
> router get this info for me and take care of DNS and NAT.

Yes.

> Is NAT and DNS the same thing (roughly speaking?)

NAT = how your computer at 192.168.x.x is able to connect to anywhere
in the world, yet it will appear to them as coming from your external
IP.

DNS = how computers translate names into IP numbers and vice versa. A
directory system, so to speak.

> Can anyone explain or point me to a reference on why Slack needs
> DNS IPs and Win does not.

(None of this applies to YOU since you're using a router which will
handle the gory details. I do hope you understand that the router is
just a luxury, not a necessity, however. Everything it does, Slack can
do, as well or better.)

Hmmm, not knowing where you got this, it's hard to say what it meant.
If you were going to use your Slack box as the PPPoE client, directly
connecting to your ISP without the Linksys, there's a little-known PPP
option, usepeerdns, which gets the nameservers from the PPP peer. Some
people will tell you that pppd on Linux can't do that, but they don't
know what they are talking about.

"usepeerdns" puts a resolv.conf in /etc/ppp. You can use a symlink at
/etc/resolv.conf ("cd /etc ; rm resolv.conf ; ln -svi ppp/$_"), or have
the ip-up script copy it to /etc.

To those who don't want to use these routers at home, I suggest you get
the dnsmasq software which is now in -current. You name your local
machines in /etc/hosts, and dnsmasq will provide DNS resolution for
those names and IP addresses.
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