How about that. I hadn't even noticed that I'm no longer a Newbie. <joy>

Somebody else mentioned this in passing, but it's important and non-intuitive: If you're running Debian (I don't know if this applies to other linux flavors) you'll have to apt-get install smbfs in order to access 'man mount.cifs' or the "-t cifs" or "-t smbfs" options to 'mount'.

For some reason, Debian's 'sarge' doesn't include the smbfs package when you invoke apt-get install samba. I don't know why but I think it's an annoying oversight. I spent a lot of hours before I stumbled across this omission.

Is there any way to continue mounting with "cifs" filesystem and be able to use windows hostnames rather than IP addresses without having to edit the "/etc/hosts" file?

IE:

mount -t cifs -o credentials=~/path/to/.smbcredentialsfile //windowspc1/share /media/share

1st choice is definitly using your internal dns server.

And, another alternative which i don't know working or not(I saw the option but never try and never read, please inform us if success)
edit /etc/nsswitch.conf
edit hosts entry to
hosts files winbind dns

However, don't put much hope on 2nd choice.
Regards,
Ks

What steps are involved within FC5? Currently, this is a small home network with Linksys router issuing IP addresses (DHCP).