Name Resolution (WINS)

NewMdkUser · 02-10-2005, 08:04 AM

I've been asked to try Mandrake at work and so far it all seems to be going well. I have run into one problem though. When I try to ping a (windows) PC on the network using it's NetBIOS name I get a 'unknown host ' response even though pinging by IP works fine. We are using WINS on the network for name resolution but the linux box doesn't seem to be seeing it. I have specified the WINS server in the smb.conf file and don't know what else to try. As there are around 250 client computers on the network using hosts/lmhosts files is not really an option. I'm sure there must be a simple answer but this is my first experience of linux!

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Brian Knoblauch · 02-10-2005, 08:51 AM

How about DNS? WINS is a dying technology, even Microsoft is tying Active Directory into DNS now.

NewMdkUser · 02-10-2005, 09:07 AM

I can't just implement DNS on the corporate network for the sake of testing one linux PC. We'll be moving to Active Directory/DNS later this year but for the moment we're stuck with WINS. Surely there must be a way round this, I'm sure we're not the only company still running an NT 4.0/WINS environment...

ugge · 02-11-2005, 09:58 AM

The [i]nmbd[/] daemon is used for name resolution by NetBIOS. Check to see that the nmbd is running.

Code:

ps aux