Beagleboard LAN Fully Qualified Name

Hey,
    I am trying to figure out how to automatically give the
beagleboard a name that is reachable from the host PC using thttpd or
apache. I want to be able to type the name into my browser and
automatically resolve the beagleboard as if it was listed on the DNS
or in the PC's /etc/hosts file, however I want it to happen
automatically rather than actually having to modify these files, i.e.
I want to be able to plug the beagle into any PC and be able to
resolve the beagle from a browser without doing anything other than
plugging it in.
    I have tried installing DNS servers such as DNSmasq onto the
beagle but with no luck. Is there any way to do this easily?

Thanks a lot,
Bob

Try Avahi
http://avahi.org/

Multicast DNS, aka Zeroconf. It just works.

Depending on your host system, you may need either this if you're running a linux or BSD operating system. If you're running Windows, install Apple's Bonjour and if you're on a Mac, it's already there.

http://www.apple.com/support/bonjour/

Since discovering Avahi, it's generally the first package I'll install on any Linux system I'm building as it makes life a lot easier from there on.

Another option is to install Samba on the beagle side, and then it
just works with windows, recent osx versions, and some linux distros.

The simplest solution (IMHO) would be to add name and ip/name to the
host file

if the ip of the BB is 192.168.1.10 and the name is beagleboard then
the line, in the hostfile would be:

192.168.1.10 beagleboard

you could use the fully qualified domain name too:

192.168.1.10 beagleboard.domain.tld

but it's not necessary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file

-greg

The beauty of mDNS is that it doesn't require any configuration and you don't need to edit any files.

On the beagle (or whatever other system you run it on), it will look at it's hostname and register itself as hostname.local using mDNS.

On the upside you don't need to hand-edit any files. On the downside, you need to install a software package. Another potential issue to look out for is if you're on a Windows network, using a domain configured as a .local (which is not best practice but Microsoft continues to make everyone's life difficult) then you may have conflicts between the mDNS .local name resolution and the DNS name resolution. I don't imagine that too many people here on this list are using a Windows network with an AD domain using a .local DNS suffix though.