Throwing Internet heat
The foundation for any server in 2001 is the ability to work with the Internetâ€"-and that means putting the Domain Name Server (DNS) into play. Fortunately, both Linux and Windows 2000 have excellent DNS servers that are completely compatible with each other's clients.
Which should you use? We prefer Linux's Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) 8.0, but frankly Windows 2000 DNS service, subsumed within AD, is good and leaves NT's DNS looking old. It's really a matter of which system you feel more comfortable with. You could, for that matter, run multiple DNS servers on both Linux and Windows 2000 servers on a single network without a hitch.
If your clients aren't using fixed IP addresses, you should look into deploying Dynamic DNS (DDNS). With DDNS, machines with addresses assigned by Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) are much easier for other systems to find. That, in turn, means you'll need to edit your DNS configuration far less often. And, by also using the newest DNS option, Service Resource Records, your customers can use DHCP to assign dynamic IP addresses to servers.
Put DDNS together with Microsoft's Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and you'll have a hybrid network that automatically can handle both IP and NetBIOS names. You then can take this one step further with Samba Server Message Block (SMB) file servers on a Unix machine and have them appear on WINS, as well. For the sake of simplicity, though, we recommend giving Samba servers a static IP address.
The upshot of all of that is you'll have a hybrid server system where your client PCs can access both Unix and Windows file and print and other services, with little administrative time wasted on resolution issues.
