hostname.localdomain problem

[momitty]

I have a weird situation/problem I'm not sure what to do with (it's actually CentOS but I think it would apply to Redhat or Fedora as well). Anyway, looking for some advice...

For a training environment I have set up a CentOS 5 Server with a database (Oracle) and a specialized web portal program. That all works fine... until Windows clients start trying to plug in to this server. Keep in mind this server needs to be able to plug into any network with minimal configuration... so DHCP is necessary, and so is a fully qualified domain name (in this case "localdomain") or Oracle blows up.

Therefore on initial install I set it up I set it up as centos.localdomain.

The hosts file looks like:
127.0.0.1 centos.localdomain centos localhost.localdomain localhost


So now here's the issue... The web portal software wants to point the user back to centos.localdomain. Meaning I can bring up the front page by going to centos but if I click a link or a log in button, etc it tries to keep going to centos.localdomain/whatever. This isn't configurable. And I can't change the hosts file or Oracle won't stay running.

From a Windows PC I can not ping centos.localdomain, I can only ping centos (and really only this is possible because samba is running).

Because the adapter in Linux is DHCP, and because these will just be average users messing with this it's not realistic to modify each Window's hosts file, or really to expect I'd even have the proper access in some situations because of whatever windows policies may have been set.

I'm not real experienced with Linux. Is there anyway I can make linux broadcast itself as centos.localdomain???

I've tried making smb.conf have centos.localdomain but samba just uses the first part of a netbios name.

Thanks!

[HROAdmin26]

Name resolution is not a "broadcast" function. Only in the world of MSFT and NetBios are names resolved via a broadcast - and these are only shortnames.

If you aren't going to change the Oracle host, you'll need to modify the clients. Either add a hosts entry for centos.localdomain to each client, or if you have access to the DNS server the clients query, you can add an entry in DNS for centos.localdomain.

* The root cause here is a lack of planning during the web portal install. I am very sure the web portal can be changed/defined with whatever "servername" you'd like to use. Reinstalling the web portal may be easier that changing your clients.

[momitty]

It's a lack of knowing the stupid web portal was going to hardcode everything in it's links and not just use relative paths

At this point I'm just trying to avoid a reinstall because getting the Oracle database to run on DHCP was a major PITA. Or trying to avoid having a database server and an app server.