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Assumptions:

You have a D-Link router that supports saving information to syslog.

You have a SuSE  Linux server or you are familiar with configuration locations on your distro. It is easy just search for syslog and your distro name. I didn’t know either.

Step 1: Open up /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf in an editor. Most web sites refer to syslog-ng.conf.in or something like that. They seem to be out of date. There is only syslog-ng.conf

Uncomment the line

#udp(ip(“0.0.0.0″) port(514));

to

udp(ip(“0.0.0.0″) port(514));

Save the file and quit.

Step 2: Restart the syslog

rcsyslog restart

Step 3: Go to your DLink routers admin page. I assume you know how to get there. On my router the tab name is Tools and then click on SYSLOG. Check “Enable logging to syslog”. and then  type the IP address of the SuSE box there. Click the “Save Settings” button at the top.

Step 4: A few minutes later check the syslog messages on the server. You can get there easily by opening up yast2 and going to Miscellaneous -> System log. Or just tail /var/log/messages.

Do not open that port on your router.

As part of my experiments to fix my gaming issues, I had uninstalled the DNS and DHCP servers from my Linux server. I don’t think that helped. But the new D-Link DIR 825 router definitely is not up to the job. All local DNS queries times out or takes forever. I did not want to install them on the same server only to have it uinstalled sometime later. That is the server where I have my file share (Samba) and mySQL running. I have a very old laptop sitting idle. I thought that was a good candidate for bare-bones Linux server. I did a bit of a search and finally decided to stick to OpenSuse. The only reason is my familiarity with this distribution.

Got the latest version: that is OpenSuse 11.1. Chrome failed to download the DVD image from the site. I installed FlashGet for IE and it is downloaded without a problem. Installed it with text GUI and minimal components required for DHCP and DNS. This laptop has only a 20GB HDD and 512MB RAM and a Pentium 4 processor. I was able to install Windows 7 Beta on it. So, Linux should not have any issues running. During this exercise the laptop died once. Battery is almost dead. It must be connected to power all the time.

After spending about 8 hours or so, I have the DHCP and DNS servers running. My home network is faster again. If you have multiple computers, none of the routers will do a good job routing data within the local network. Windows is less affected than Linux machines. Once I installed the DNS and DHCP servers, communication between Linux servers and and Windows desktops have improved a lot. PuTTY sessions were painfully slow.

Accessing my web servers from outside was also slow. I confirmed that this is a lot better now. A good use of a laptop that is not good enough for anything else.

This is on OpenSuse 11.1

Setup: Dynamic DNS setting with DHCP (?)

Setup DHCP so that it updates the DNS zone files.

There is a documentation at /usr/share/doc/packages/dhcp-server/DDNS-howto.txt that explains half of the stuff. That will get you through the DHCP stuff.

Not documented:

Once you create the key file it need to be in the /var/lib/named/etc

The file should be owned by root:named

OK, I am waiting for the output from genDDNSkey. How long should I wait before I press ctrl + C? I tried the same command on 2 servers so far and it won’t return. One of them Open Suse 10.x and the other one is a new 11.1.

All searches turns up the same text from /usr/share/doc/packages/dhcp-server/DDNS-howto.txt. People have copied and pasted from that file over and over on different sites.

Right now it is running one two servers and I don’t think they are ever going to come out. What is the alternative? Read the .sh file to figure out what it is doing?

Hmm, it has returned on a server that is multi core processor with lots of RAM.

Alright, it returned after about 10 minutes. I should tweet this instead of blogging