I've just recently upgrade my Slackware from 9.1 to 11.0 and I'm having a problem with Samba. I don't think I had a single trouble with this when I was using 9.1 but unfortunately I didn't make a backup of my configuration files (although I'm pretty sure they where the same). Bear in mind, that I don't know much about networks.

The clients on my network are currently these...

RTA1320 (Internet Router)
192.168.1.1

Link (Windows XP Pro SP2 Box)
192.168.1.2

Sen (Slackware 11)
192.168.1.3

They are all connected to a switch/hub and all use the subnet mask 255.255.255.0. They have are using a static IP setup and use the NETBIOS name; Home.

The problem is that I cannot ping my Windows box (Link) from Slackware (Sen) by it's hostname, however I can ping it fine the other way around. I can also ping all clients fine using the IP address. While I know it's possible to hard code this in /etc/hosts, I would rather not, since it would be a huge pain to change once many other clients are plugged in.

Windows has no problems with this, so how does it do it? I read something about enabling WINS support, but according to the smb.conf man page, this shouldn't be enabled unless I'm running a multi-subnetted network.

It's also worth noting, that I can use the nmblookup command to find an IP address from a hostname. Is it possible to forward this to Samba somehow?

Huge thanks to any replies.

Something is wrong when 2 machines have the same ip adress in the same subnetwork. Try making it 192.168.1.2 or whatever on any of the two machines.

Sorry, that IP would be a typo. It has always been 192.168.1.1-3. I've edited my post.

I'm having the same problem myself. I've disabled firewalls and everything and it still isn't working.

I'm a bit confused... where have you defined your computers as "Link" and "Sen"? I get the impression that those names are netbios names or something. In that case you shouldn't be able ping them with those names - they have nothing to do with Unix hostnames.

You could either define the hostnames in /etc/hosts on each computer or load the hosts definition from a central hosts file. Or set up a DNS server, although that would probably be an overkill in a 3 computer network. Am I missing something essential?

Hi,

Have you made sure that all the hostnames to ip adds have been placed in the /etc/hosts file, on the host Sen?

192.168.1.1 RTA1320 #(Internet Router)
192.168.1.2 Link #(Windows XP Pro SP2 Box)
192.168.1.3 Sen #(Slackware 11)

Just a thought!!

I'm having basically the same problem. I can't ping (eg) either of two windows boxes from my Linux (Fedora Core 5) box using their "computer names" but their IP addresses work fine. But both Windows boxes are fine pinging each other's names as well as the Linux box hostname.

I know I could probably put the Windows boxes in /etc/hosts but that doesn't work for me since I'm letting my DSL Router do local DHCP IP address assignments which change from time to time. But the router shows all three names with their assigned IP addresses and the two Windows boxes seem to handle it fine as well. If they can keep track of the (changing) local IP address to name relations, why can't my Linux box.

This kind of problem is supposed to work the other way around! 8^)


Mike

Mike Jewell
One-Up Audio

You need to start the winbindd server.
man winbindd for more informations