Re: [BackupPC-users] BackupPC pings by hostname, but backs up by ip?

[Dave F. <da...@da...>]

On Thursday 01 February 2007 5:54 am, Les Stott wrote:
> > First: the backuppc website needs to be updated to reflect that this list
> > is a members-only list.  I originally sent this email without joining but
> > received the "Your post awaits moderation" email.  So I joined the list
> > and have resent it.

Minor errata, that should read "re-sent", not "resent", heh.  Sorry about 
that.  Didn't notice how much a missing hyphen changed the meaning there.

> > I have an interesting situation.  It appears that backuppc is pinging
> > hosts by hostname, but backing up by IP address.  So what happens then is
> > that the hostname for my laptop (dhcp on the network) doesn't resolve to
> > my laptop, but for some reason or other it does resolve.  It resolves to
> > someone else's machine out on the interwebby.  So pings fail unless I
> > increase the timeout. Increasing the timeout is just a hack here, because
> > it means I'm pinging some other machine to decide whether or not to
> > backup my own machine.
>
> You've got something wrong with your dns setup. Dont confuse netbios
> name lookups with dns related pings, they are completely different. What
> is your computer's hostname? what domain is passed down to the pc via
> dhcp, if any?

No domain, the computer's hostname is just "ghostwheel".  I'm a home user, so 
I'm sitting behind a cheap linksys wireless nat router, with the router 
configured as a gateway and all pc's use it as their dns server.

> In an internal situation you usually create an internal dns zone, i like
> to use "lan". So you setup those zones on your dns server, whether it be
> on the backuppc server or another one.
>
> Then you tell /etc/resolv.conf to search "lan" and specify the nameserver.
>
> sounds like your internal domain is configured as a public one, and your
> backuppc server is set to look at internet dns servers first and has no
> local zone file. Hence the resolution to a remote address.

Backup server has a local hosts file that only contains hosts with static ips.  
I certainly wouldn't mind having it update itself with dhcp hosts, if that 
fixes it.  I'm not in a hurry to set up a dns server, like I say, I'm just a 
home user.  I just want backuppc to ping the right host.  :)  I'm willing to 
stop the samba service and have it do something else, and would have 
preferred not to install samba in the first place on the laptop, but the 
backuppc docs didn't help me do it for whatever reason (probably general 
dumbness on my side), and I wanted it working.

> Hope that helps.

Thanks!

Dave

> Regards,
>
> Les