Transition Static IP net to DHCPCD

[David Rankin]

Ries, I need your wisdom! (and the rest of the Samba community as well)

I currently have a Linux box with Samba 2.07 serving a Win95, two Win98s and
a WinME machine. The install is a Mandrake 7.2 server install on the Linux
box. Right now I have all my machines using static IP's 192.168.0.10
(11,12&13). My smb.conf "name reslove order" = wins lmhosts host bcast. I
want to use DHCP and get rid of the static IP's.  I have samba as my wins
server and each of my machines is listed in lmhost and host. I have each of
my Win9x machines listing the other Win9x machines and the Linux box as DNS
servers (not sure about this one, but --  My net runs great!)

I need advise on how to make the transition to DHCP. I have read the HOW-TOs
and I am confortable with dhcpd and the dhcp.conf entries and dhcp.leases
files. What I need to know is what in the heck do I do with the lmhosts and
hosts files when I start using DHCP to prevent name resolution conflicts???
Do I just edit the files and remove the static entries? Can I just remove
the entries from lmhosts and hosts for one of my machines, start DHCP and
use the machine with no entries in lmhosts and hosts as my test machine for
DHCP.

This is all being contemplated in anticipation of adding cable modem service
to my office which will be distributed to all machines through a Linksys
cable/dsl router that also does DHCP and NAT. Do I even need to move to DHCP
before I add the router? The Linksys does DHCP, do I even need to configure
my Linux box to do DHCP? What I don't want to happen is to add the router
and switch to DHCP and have my Win9x boxes not be able to access my samba
server.

I need help! What would you do in this situation?

David Rankin
drankin at txucom.net