On Thu 05 Oct 2017 at 08:55:33 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Wed, Oct 04, 2017 at 07:23:51PM -0500, David Wright wrote: > > Well, thank you. But this doesn't explain the paragraph above my comment. > > I'm just trying to understand the suggestions being made by more > > experienced folk here, like Reco and Greg. > > My rationale is that having access to the Internet allows you to look up > the answers to your problems, allows you to install missing software, etc. > Being able to ping barney from fred on your LAN is pretty unimportant > for most problem resolutions, compared to being able to ask Google "how > do I set up NAT on Debian stretch", or whatever issue you're currently > trying to solve.
I had assumed that the OP still had internet access from their other machines. > As far as /etc/hosts vs. setting up an internal DNS server, most home > LANs are probably small enough that I would simply use /etc/hosts. > Things may change if you live in a mansion with a staff, or you're the > landlord for an apartment building, or something. My cut-off point would > probably be a dozen machines. If there are more than a dozen machines, > then I would consider setting up an internal DNS server for them. I always think it odd that a router that issues hostnames and IP addresses to hosts can't spit the same information out when given a DNS query. But I've assumed that setting it up to do so would involve no work; the work is in typing the information into the DHCP pages. So if you have a DNS-serving router, it would seem defeatest to then have to maintain /etc/hosts files, and it just hides the problem which, thankfully, has now been found. Cheers, David.
