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David Mackintosh
Asked: 2009-06-04 18:26:49 +0800 CST

Automatically name an XP node from DHCP/DNS

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So one of the things that many (most?) Linux distributions can do is to either accept the dhcp option telling it what its node name should be, and/or do a reverse-lookup on the ip address it has been given via dhcp and apply its initial node name from that answer.

Is there a way to make XP do either of those?

windows-xp dhcp

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Nope, unfortunately. The computer name is set in the registry, and it's not going to change based on DHCP or a reverse DNS lookup.

    (I suppose, technically, it could be possible, but I'd guess you'd need a reboot after setting the name.)

    (Okay, okay-- I suppose this wouldn't be that hard to do, but I'm fairly sure you're going to incur a reboot each time the name changes. Still, you could do this in a startup script, and if the name doesn't change, just boot as normal. Hey... this might be fun to write!)

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  2. Its possible with a little help of wsname: http://mystuff.clarke.co.nz/MyStuff/wsname.asp

    1. collect the name and mac-address from your dhcpd.leases or write them on your own in a file (Mac2DnsName.txt") on a samba-share. Each line holds he mac-address and the name like this: 00508B052AE8 = Computer1
    2. write a autostart-batch with this content: wsname /RDF:"\\pdc\netlogon\Mac2DnsName.txt" /DFK:$MAC

    So everytime the machine boots wsname looks into this file. If the PC-name differs (e.g. after a cloning-run), it changes the name and does a reboot. If the name doesn`t differ, nothing happens.

    Runs like a charm here in several schools.

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