[plug] Basic DHCP questions

[Steege, Phil E]

I wanted to try using dhcp on my small three computer network.
I run a linux Smoothwall 0.9.9 system on one machine and it is the dhcp
server, and is connected to my ISP via an external 56K modem.
The other two machines are redhat 7.2 linux machines which were static IP
addressed.

I set the rh72 machines as dhcp clients using netconfig program and they
both received IP address, from the pool of addresses on the dhcp server,
when I restarted their networks.

I have been having problems, since the dhcp change, where the machines are
giving me errors that they cannot find a particular hostname.  Specifically
I get errors from lpd, on reboot.
Sorry I do not have screen dumps of the errors.  I can provide that if
required.

My question is do I have to remove the hostname/ip addresses I have in the
/etc/hosts file, and change the /etc/nsswitch.conf to be "dns file nis"
instead of "files dns nis"?  How does dhcp or arp keep track of a machine
hostname to ip address connection, when the ip addresses can change each
time you reboot?  Is there a dhcp cache or config file maintained by dhcp
which assigns hostnames to mac addresses to keep it all straight?

Cheers

Phil