README

To install the program pair tellem and tellme, which together provide
internal DNS to a lan by updating everyone's /etc/hosts file periodically,
first unzip this file to a handy place.  If, for example, it's in your
home/youruser/Downloads directory, extract from there, and it will create a 
subdirectory of /home/youruser/landns.

Of course, you have perl, right?  This is for linux, which always does already,
though the latest version your distro likes isn't required, it's reccomended.

Get a terminal there - wherever all these files are after you unzip.

Then say (on ubuntu anyway)

sudo ./LanDNS

at your terminal prompt, followed of course, by enter.

If you are not root while running the install script, it will die and print
various errors related to "permission denied".  It's just moving some
files to root-owned directories and making some of them executable.

I didn't name the installer "install" since that word is overused all over
linux, and if you forget the ./, (which means here) funny things might happen.


What the install script does is simply copy some files from "here" to
where they need to be to work.  The two .conf files need to be in /etc/init,
and the runnable perl scripts need to be in /usr/bin.  It takes root priveleges
to write to either place, so you have to use sudo, or if you are on a distro
that supports it, simply log in as root.  The install script assumes that
all the files are "here" - wherever it was run from.

the .conf files simply let the system know on the next boot that it should
run the scripts in /usr/bin.  You could put them anyplace by hand if you
liked, but you'd then have to edit the .conf files accordingly.

Once the install is complete (it has to be on at least two machines for
it to make any difference) and you've restarted, you should be able
to find tellem and tellme in the system monitor processes tab - they
should be sleeping almost 100% of the time.  You'll have to change your
preferences in system monitor to "all processes" as it defaults to 
"my processes" - and root owns these when they are running.  It must, as
tellme writes the root-owned file /etc/hosts to keep it updated as
you turn machines on your LAN on and off.  This finds new machines very
quickly (as they boot) and takes around 2 minutes to drop one it hasn't heard
from in awhile.

Once things are working, you can delete all these files from your download/unzip
directory.  They're not needed anymore, we've made copies in the system
directories they'll live in until you remove them, which is, for now, a by-hand
affair.
