get netbios name from ip address?
 

At the CLI, I want to know how to get a netbios name from an IP address. It seems that every solution that I have found is windows based, or requires me to install something beyond samba. Please tell me that there is a simple "prog-x -somearg 192.168.1.100" or similar to get the netbios name - and that it doesn't require a reconfiguration of my server?

For instance, I would like this to be usable on a desktop system in an ad hoc without having to be run from root.

Not sure what "beyond Samba" means, but samba should contain the answer. Is this not visible from "smbclient -L a.b.c.d"?

And if you aren't using Samba, why would you possibly care about netbios names?

Absolutely! That gave me all the info I need! Now why was that so hard for me to find?!?

By beyond I meant in addition to. This will help me diagnose quite a bit in my network, I think.

nmap might be worth looking into as well.

e.g.
nmap --script smb-os-discovery.nse -p445 hostname

Dave

NetBIOS. *shudder*

@acid_kewpie: yeah, my roomies like their PC's like they like their, um, NM.

@ilikejam: Yours seems to work better, and is parsable by shell script. Thank you as well. I am still a noob at nmap...

yeah, nmap FTW. it is so useful it's unreal.

If your system runs the avahi daemon, then "getent hosts <ip_address>" may return both the hostname and IP address using zeroconf (mdns). It depends on how your nsswitch.conf and host.conf are configured.

You can also run "getent hosts <hostname>". This will also return IP addresses for hosts on the internet. For avahi, add .local to the hostname. E.G.
getent hosts elite.local
192.168.1.106 elite.local

I configure my router to map MAC numbers to IP addresses, which allows me to maintain an /etc/hosts file. Entering "getent hosts elite.local" allows me to conveniently look up another hosts IP address before entering it in /etc/hosts.

It can depend on your lan.

Try this nmblookup -A ip_address