Samba and hostname resolution
 

Hi,

I regularly setup Samba servers for mixed networks, and it's more or less routine. Usually this means that the Samba server also takes care of DHCP and DNS (using Dnsmasq), and before fine-tuning Samba, I make sure that all hosts can be reached by their respective hostnames.

Now I have a special use case, and I wonder if it's possible to setup a Samba server in a network where hosts can not necessarily be reached by their hostnames. The Samba server and the backup server have static IP addresses outside the DHCP range, but other than that, no local DNS is configured.

Any suggestions?

Sure. Pretty sure you'll be able to reach the samba server by its netbios name without local dns. If I recall, the samba server will broadcast it and smb clients will be able to use it. (Or clients can browse the server by using the server ip of course.) Sorry if I'm not understanding the question.

You can also access SAMBA shares directly via IP address. Or, as I do on my DHCP/DNS router, assign a host name to the reserved, static IP. My network is a mix of DHCP and static IP assignments and every box has a human readable name.

@kikinovak - I'm interested whether workstations did indeed find the samba server without local dns services?

Cheers

Yup. It's worked fine here for years. Just wondering if kikinovak got it all going okay :-)

If you use dhcp to configure the clients you should also specify the netbios server option in your dhcpd conf. If you don't, you will have to tell each client manually where the wins server is.

First of all, thanks everybody for your suggestions. I found a solution where I could setup a sane DNS in this network, so I won't have to experiment without hostnames.