Does Amahi require to be running as a DHCP server?

[thomasps]

From the FAQ we have three options:
1.Does Amahi require to be running as a DHCP server?
2.Use only your HDA's caching DNS server
3.No change in DHCP or DNS in your router

1 is the default. 3 i turn off DHCP server in the dashboard.
What about 2? Any changes to Amahi?

[bigfoot65]

See http://www.amahi.org/faq#is-dhcp-server-required.

[thomasps]

See http://www.amahi.org/faq#is-dhcp-server-required.

Yes I understand, in fact I pasted those options from the FAQ
What I am asking is whether or not we need to make any changes to AMAHI (I understand the router changes) for the option that says "Use only your HDA's caching DNS server"
Thanks.

[moncapitaine]

If you only want to use chanching DNS server, go to server in the settings tab (http://hda/setup?sub=servers&tab=setting),
click on dhcp serb´ver, remove the watchdog check and stop the server.
That way you'll use your routers dhcp.

[thomasps]

If you only want to use chanching DNS server, go to server in the settings tab (http://hda/setup?sub=servers&tab=setting),
click on dhcp serb´ver, remove the watchdog check and stop the server.
That way you'll use your routers dhcp.

Thanks moncapitaine!

[rjwaldren]

This applies to those of us running open firmware on our routers, from Thomas other thread it looks like he's running DD-WRT.

I'd been looking up how other people have broken DNS away from their HDA, found alot of questions but not alot of solutions so I thought I'd share it here. Over the w/e I got it working with full short name resolution on a tomato router.

This uses "DNS poisoning" to redirect all lookups for home.com to the ip of your HDA.

First disable the HDA DHCP server as described above, leave DNS enabled.
On the router
1. Set the domain in the "indentification" tab. ie home.com
2. In Advanced > DHCP/DNS enable "use local DNS" and add an entry redirecting home.com to the IP of your hda to the DNS Custom Config:
address=/home.com/192.168.xxx.xxx
3. Save the config and renew your client pc leases and ensure that your Gateway/DNS is pointed at your router. On windows hosts it wouldn't hurt to run ipconfig /flushdns from a command line

hda, settings, setup and any short name lookups for apps should now be sent directly to your amahi server.

BTW - I spent a while thinking this method wouldn't work, but the problem ended up being DD-WRT, tried it under TomatoUSB and it worked perfect right off the bat. TomatoUSB uses a newer dnsmasq than DD-WRT and my RT-16n has been rock solid and performed much better with Tomato.

[cpg]

NIIICE!

If this weren't so freaking hard to do, this would be the perfect solution for Amahi and energy saving!

=> Turn off Amahi (say at night) and all is cool in the network!
=> Turn it on and all is cool, all (well, mabbe not all), but substantially all Amahi services/apps working!

Nice!!

DHCP and DNS are not meant to be so dynamic and things like these are not supported too widely, so we cannot really put effort to make this more widespread!

Maybe one day Amahi will come integrated with the hardware in the router

Care to make a wiki page with the content above and we can put it in the FAQ??

[rjwaldren]

That's exactly the intent... On another NAS solution I was using a script on my router to watch the LAN clients and wake/shutdown the NAS "on demand". Incidentally the NAS drives a relay to power on/off the laser printe, within my little MDF - I cut out about a 100W draw for 24hrs to about 4hrs/day - most of that is the printer - my Atom based NAS draws less that 30W. Now that I have the DHCP/DNS issue worked out my router only needs to send the wake to the NAS when it sees a client comes up and jayrocks AES can handle the shutdown.

I'll work on something this W/E for the wiki.

EDIT... ^^^Maybe not, I can live with it but, it will cause problems for some... Read on...
Automatically appending the domain, as shown in my previous post, breaks things like Firefox key words and address bar searches. It also has the undesirable side effect of "ping asdfqwerty" expanding to asdfqwerty.home.com which the hda will answer. I would bet that alot of people actually have this breakage and don't realize it.
I guess it just didn't click last night, all names without a domain (ie gmail, asdf, qwerty) resolve to the HDA since home.com is automatically appended. Invalid app names bring up the hda logon page, valid app names do the right thing. Removing the domain and explicitly defining the apps as below will avoid having mistyped names resolved to the HDA and keep address bar searches/keywords functional, but it does need to be updated when apps change < but scriptable .

address=/hda/hda.home.com/settings/settings.home.com/linfo/linfo.home.com/192.168.1.250