I've been looking around for answers to this issue and seem to get the same response every time. I can ping an IP address on the network but cannot ping by the NetBIOS host name. The typical answer to this problem is to edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and add wins in the list of host lookups. My problem is that I have already done this and it is not alleviating the issue.

I do have a special case though. I noticed that it stopped resolving host names after I plugged in a second network adapter. I have a draft-n router that I'm setting up connected to my computer and nothing else on eth0 and the rest of my network plugged in to eth1. Both adapters are using 192.168.0.0/24 network address space if that makes any difference (not sure if it's appropriate network etiquette). If I bring down eth0 (the draft-n router), I can suddenly ping by host name again, but as soon as I bring it back up, its back to not resolving.

Let me know if there's any more information I can provide to clarify this problem. Thanks!

I'm kinda near the limit of my knowledge here, but since you haven't had any other replies ...

I am not sure assigning the two interfaces the same address space is permitted. I do know that once I tried to do some overlapping of address space and ran into weirdness I didn't understand; the problems went away when I removed the overlap. (I have forgotten details.) At the very least, if you are going to try this make sure your routing table is directing packets where they need to go.

I don't know why you are assigning the two cards the same address space, but I wonder if perhaps what you really want to do is to form a bridge with the two cards instead.

For the record, I don't have any experience with NetBIOS or wins. But your description makes me think this is a more general networking problem and NetBIOS is just the symptom.

Excellent, I bridged them together and it all seems to be running smoothly now. Thanks for helping me out, I'm still quite the network .