Linux and NetBios name resolution
 

Windows will happily broadcast to obtain an address for a given name, can Linux be made to do that? I'd rather avoid using lmhosts as machine names sometimes change, and there is no DNS/DHCP server locally.

Thanks,
Steve :)

Look at the Lisa package..

sorry, could i have more info on this? i'm trying to apply netbios local resolution to MacOSX (which is bsd-based) and i'd like to have more info. thanks.

Thats because Windows uses a horrible networking protocol called Netbios, which anybody with any sense has nothing to do with.

As it happens linux is capable of catering to Windows little foibles using a package called samba which allows full windows networking functionality on linux.

www.samba.org is a good place to start, and I'd be surprised if your distribution didn't provide it.

of course i have samba and everything is ok, but i mean a "lower level" of netbios resolution, e.g. with a ping or entering "http://computername" to open a site on another pc.

Lisa is the bird for you. You´ll find her at http://lisa-home.sourceforge.net

Download her and modify sourceforge´s instructions for slackware, so they suite your distro.

Lisa is heaven´s gift to lazy dummies like me. I don't even need to configure Samba. My only problem was, that Suse has no instructions on how to open the firewall for Lisa.

You're getting DNS and Netbios name resolution confused with each other. Windows does allow this crossover of name resolution and I'll tell you it causes all manner of mis-diagnosies in name resolution problems.

I'm not sure if samba allows DNS resolution by netbios name or not but maybe thats what lisa does.