I confess that much of what follows is not particularly familiar to me - I'm trying to integrate a Linux box into our Windows 2000 network with the help of a couple of colleagues who are more familar with networking than I am although not as familiar with Linux (though this isn't saying much).

The DNS server is on Windows 2000. The Linux box appears to be reading DNS entries but isn't broadcasting to the rest of the network.

With other computers on the network we can access the Linux box via it's IP address and by it's NetBIOS name. However, we can't access the Linux box by it's full domain name.

Both NMBD and SMBD are running. We're currently using DHCP but I gather that this is probably not advisable and our intention is to give the Linux box a static IP address.

Could anybody at least point us in the general direction of where we might find a solution to this problem. We're not necessarily after a word for word description of the answer - though that would be nice :-)


Michael Egan

Well as far I understand it has nothing to do with your linux machine. You said your DNS server is a windows 2000 machine.
So that's the one who should know the name of the linux box so it can spread it on to the rest. A machine doesn't broadcast it's dns name like it would do for a netbios name. That's not how DNS works.

Yes - you managed to point us in the right direction.

We needed to manually insert entries in the reverse and forward lookup zones on the Windows 2000 server. This seems to have done the job.

Now to tackle half a dozen other problems I'm having with the Linux box on the network!