Creating a domain in Winxp Network

[jnxx]

I hope someone can help me with this, as i've been searching the net this whole morning.

Basically, i have three comps all running Winxp and all fitted with Nics, ive allocate4d the ip addresses 192.168.0.1 - 3, no DHCP.What i would like to do is to create a (network)domain, nothing to do with internet. All the info i got from the net always mentions DHCP in conjunction with a domain. And i've no idea where to find DHCP or if it is on my system or not.

Also, i want to run a SMTP server program that i've created, but it requires a domain name.

Has anyone got any idea how i can get all this sorted? Or perhaps point me in the right direction?

Cheers

 

[pansophic]

Probably not the right forum for this, there is a TCP/IP forum, which is closer to the subject.

The domain that you are describing is associated with the Internet, it is the name of the network that will be resolved through DNS (Domain Name Service) to connect you with your mail server. But in your case, since you are doing this without a connection to the internet, the domain name is irrelevant. You can insert the IP address in it's place.

If you developed the mail server yourself, why did you insist on a domain name? They are not necessary, merely extremely convenient.

Another option is to install a Linux box instead of one of the XP boxes and run a DNS server. You would be able to define the domain, run a DHCP server, and install a different mail server so that you can verify the relay function of your mail server, rather than just the ability to accept mail from a given client. All of these functions are free on Linux.


pansophic

 

[jnxx]

So,creating a network domain with Winxp is not possible? I wanted to create email addresses for the network, iguess that wont be possible without this DHCP stuff?

 

[pansophic]

No, it is possible with XP, you need to find a DNS Server package, like

http://posadis.sourceforge.net/

which is an open source package (may or may not do what you need, the documentation was fuzzy). You can enable a DHCP server in Windows by turning on Internet connection sharing on one of your XP boxes so that it will serve DHCP addresses, but DHCP has literally nothing to do with email at all. DHCP is just a way to dynamically assign IP address. You can safely ignore any reference to DHCP while creating your test "domain."

Or you can create a hosts file on each of the XP boxes and define static IP address definitions.

192.168.0.1 test1.localdomain.com test1
192.168.0.2 test2.localdomain.com test2
192.168.0.3 test3.localdomain.com test3

And put this on each of the computers in the network. Define your SMTP server's domain as localdomain.com and you should be good to go.

Of course static hosts files won't work very well with DHCP addresses.


pansophic

 

[jnxx]

Thank you very much pansophic! I understand this a bit better now.

I'll try using the hosts file
Thank you very much indeed