Ping linux box by hostname from windows

[daviddoria]

I have read all morning about how to supposedly do this.

Things i have tried with no succes:

1)added "wins bcast" to hosts: in /etc/nsswitch.conf.

2)added "wins support=yes" to /etc/samba/smb.conf

of course I have restarted smb (and even network) after each of these changes.

I have also tried disabling the firewall.

I know how to add the linux IP to the hosts file in windows, but I'd rather not do that on all 20 machines here. I also saw how to run a wins server on the linux box, but then i'd still have to go around to each windows machine and add the wins server ip.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks,

David

[scottro]

Have you restarted nmb as well? That's the one that gives out the NETBIOS stuff. (If nmb wasn't running at all, that would also explain the problem. :) )

[mbratch]

I assume you also have one of the machines set up as the WINS server? What did you tell Samba your WINS server is?

[stevea]

Uhg - Windows and their (non)standard networking !
Of course DNS is the network standard means of resolving names, and both Win and Lin will use it out of the box for standard network apps like "ping" or "telnet" or "ftp".

I sincerely do not know, but would a DNS name resolution work for SMB applications as well ?
It's pretty trivial to set up the Lin system as a DNS service with dnsmasq.

(suggestion, not asolution - sorry.).

[daviddoria]

wow.... thanks scottro!
how did i not see ANYTHING about nmb while looking for this??

Dave

[scottro]

I'm not sure. At least in FreeBSD, if you add samba to their equivalent of services, it will start both smbd and nmbd. I'm not sure about most Linux distros.

However, don't feel badly, I have a short page about samba problems in Fedora and missing nmb is number three on the list. :)

Also, you know that when you put wins support you are making the Linux box the WINS server, right? If you want it to be a WINS client, you use the wins server = (and the IP address of the WINS server). It's a little counter-intuitive.

[mbratch]

For as long as I've run RedHat and Fedora, both nmbd and smbd are started with Samba.

[bradchaus]

in order to ping the fedora box by name from a windoze box you need some sort of name resolution. you can achieve this by either running a dns server on your fedora box and making a zones file for your network, or you can add the fedora ip and name into c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts

[scottro]

@mbratch as near as I can see, there isn't a "samba" program to start with chkconfig, ntsysv or services. (I didn't check the system-config-services thing.)

I don't use samba much on RH based systems though. So, where do you start up samba? I'm assuming from your post that there's samba command, and that it's a bit similar to FreeBSD, where you have a samba script, an smbd script, a winbind script and an nmbd script--you can start any of the three without the others, or you can choose the samba script which starts all three.

Thanks.