By external I mean WAN... The Internet
By internal I mean LAN... Home Network.

I have a router (WRT54G) with three Windows XP Clients connected to it, they use DHCP and have no troubles connecting to each other through a hostnames, nor do they have any troubles resolving hostnames on the internet.

With my Fedora Core 2 Client, it can only connect to my Windows XP Clients through the IP Addresses and same with the Windows XP Clients to the Fedora Core 2 Client. They do not resolve hostnames for each other yet the Windows Clients do it just fine between each other. My router has registered it's the hostname of the Fedora Core 2 Client along with the other Windows XP Clients in the DHCP Lease table.

Both my Windows XP and Fedora Core 2 clients can connect perfectly fine to the Internet. I have tried static IP addresses and setting the DHS Servers to the IP of the Router instead of the ones assigned to the Client by DHCP in Network Configuration and it hasn't changed anything.

Why is this happening and What can I do to correct it?

Thanks,
The Land of Smeg.

I have nearly the same problem. Same router (although I've also had a D-link DI-514 with the same results), multiple XP boxes and (in my case two) Fedora Core 3 linux boxes. By making sure Samba is set up with my workgroup name and runs at startup, my windoze boxes can resolve the linux boxes, but the reverse is not true. The linux boxes can ping any address on the network (internal or external) by IP, but they can only resolve external (internet/WAN) addresses by name.

It appears to me that I get the windoze boxes to see resolve the linux machines by mimicking standard Win32 behavior through samba. However, that is only true in regards to the linux box "broadcasting" its information somehow to the windoze machines (WINS, perhaps?). However, nothing seems to be able to make the linux machine use whatever windoze does to resolve internal names.

As I understand it the router does not act as an internal DNS server -- only as a passthrough DNS server for WAN addresses. I dunno... I'm getting fairly frustrated with trying to make it work...

-eagle79-

After further research, it would seem that there's not really anything we can do. See the link below for more information:

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba...er/033254.html

I think this is definitely somewhere linux could be improved, whatever the distro.... I know WINS is a windoze technology, but linux needs to be as interoperable as possible if it wishes to gain ground in markets other than the business markets (where this wouldn't be a problem because a DNS server would take care of things for us). If only I knew enough to contribute the solution...

After all this work, I finally find something that works on at least one of my machines. Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf as root and modify the hosts line to add "wins" (no quotes) to the end. Suddenly pinging a windoze machine from my linux box resolves the IP address.

Who knew? (and why didn't they tell me?)

Don't know what this means for name resolution between two linux boxes though.... I guess I'll find out.