DHCP, DNS, hostname and Amahi

[lindeborg]

Don´t get me wrong, I think Amahi is great work and is on the right road to be truly one of the Linux Home Server distributions, but.

Why must Amahi take the role as DHCP/DNS in the network?
Okay it´s a feature to make it easy to resolv the web-apps and the administration. Still I prefer my router to be DHCP/DNS in my network, and I prefer to name my servers as I please. Better then to make the DHCP/DNS feature an option and to present the web-apps as pages like http://[APP].[HOSTNAME] or [HOSTIP].

[cpg]

it's optional.

you can do whatever you want, it's your box.


99% of people would like that much control, however you can use your own.
we'll make disabling the dhcp server easier in the future. too many layers of fault tolerance (to make sure it works) need to be carefully peeled off to make disabling it easier (search this forum).

[lindeborg]

Define optional...
It's the default behavior and if I disable it I loose a lot of functionality since I can't reach all apps and configurations in the webinterface from other hosts. Using the app name and not the host name as URL is really strange and I can't think of any other server that behaves this way. I think the default behavior ought to be that one connects to the webinterface of the server via the hostname/ IP address and possibly a port number. That doesn't interfere with the servers ability to be a DNS or a DHCP server.

[cpg]

hi lindeborg,

Define optional ...
It's the default behavior and if I disable it I loose a lot of functionality since I can't reach all apps and configurations in the webinterface from other hosts.

you could create host names in your clients that need access to those apps (can be done on windows, mac and linux). also, if you have a good dns server in your router or some other system in the network, you can persuade it to make custom aliases for the hda.

i'll give you that most people don't have the skill or ability to do that (that's why is the default).

Using the app name and not the host name as URL is really strange and I can't think of any other server that behaves this way. I think the default behavior ought to be that one connects to the webinterface of the server via the hostname/ IP address and possibly a port number. That doesn't interfere with the servers ability to be a DNS or a DHCP server.

making people to have to remember ip addresses or port numbers seems hard to remember for users.
however, that does not matter, since you like that. amahi and open source are about choice.

if you could take a minute to file a feature request with concrete in the bug tracker, it gets registered and maybe someone can do it.

or better yet, if you know a bit about apache, you make your own patch to the sources and contribute it the exact way you like it! my guess is that this would require a separate virtual host just for all the apps and some rewriting engine mojo to forward requests back and forth to each app without mixing them.

or convince a friend who can do development to do it.