[PLUG] DHCP, NetBios, and identifying machines by name

MIke C. (Tech. Coord.) mike.connors at albertagrocery.coop
Sun Aug 10 20:06:21 UTC 2014


I think that nsswitch.conf, /etc/hosts and winbind is want you want to use.

"The Name Service Switch (NSS) configuration file, */etc/nsswitch.conf*, is
used by the GNU C Library to determine the sources from which to obtain
name-service information in a range of categories"

If one or a few computers need to get name resolution for few other
computers then an /etc/hosts file on each computer makes sense if computer
network addresses and network topology are gong to remain fairly static and
updating the /etc/hosts file on a few computers isn't so bad and a DNServer
isn't necessary.

If you're using a DHCP server, you might be able to do DHCP reservation, if
your network device (wifi router) supports it, which would provide static
ip addresses for using /etc/hosts file for name resolution without
configuring static ip addrs on every computer on the network.

All a DNserver does is centralize updating of hostname/ip pairs and name
resolution lookup.

As this article will also state you don't need the SMB service to be
running for Linux computers to do name lookups of Windows computers, but
the Samba package inlcludes winbind which you can enable as a name lookup
service in nsswitch.conf.

However, if the ip addr of the windows box is not changing then winbind
isn't necessary.

https://www.zulius.com/how-to/resolve-windows-netbios-names-from-linux/

Hope that makes sense and is helpful!

Cheers,

Mike








On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Dale Snell <ddsnell at frontier.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 10 Aug 2014 10:24:09 -0700
> tim at wescottdesign.com wrote:
>
> > Now I can see Servo from this computer, and I can get to its files
> > using Samba, but all the "pure linux" apps can't identify it by name
> > -- even though I can ping my wife's Windows machine by name!!!
> >
> > Does anyone know how to resolve this?  We use the office machine as
> > our svn server and I have my kid writing software for me this
> > summer.  If worse comes to absolute worst I'll just assign the thing
> > an ethernet address off the router's DHCP table, but I'd rather not
> > have to manage a bunch of fixed IP addresses if I can help it.
>
>
> Check /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname.  They should look something
> like this:
>
> /etc/hosts:
>
> 127.0.0.1   servo servo.local localhost localhost.local localhost4 \
> localhost4.local4
> ::1         servo servo.local localhost localhost.local localhost6 \
> localhost6.local6
>
>
> /etc/hostname:
>
> servo.local
>
>
> That should be sufficient.  If not, I'm sure someone will let us
> know.  :-)
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> --Dale
>
> --
> Penn's aunts made great apple pies at low prices.  No one else
> in town could compete with the pie rates of Penn's aunts.
>
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>



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