Hello

The situation is this. I have a network of computers connected to a router which also provides DHCP addresses for the clients. The network contains both Windows and Linux clients. The Windows clients do not have problems resolving the names between themselves. But they can not identify Linux machines and vice versa by names (but all of them can ping each other by ip addresses).

I assume that this on the lines of WINS resolution. How can I make Linux clients as well to participate in this naming game? Or what is the efficient way to achieve the machines in the network identify between themselves by names even though their ip addresses change dynamically?

Your help is much appreciated.

Thanks

I would use static leases by mac address and see if that would help out any, but that's just my personal opinion.

The standard means of name resolution is DNS and you are correct in your assumption on the WINS resolution for the Windows networks. By default, Linux does not participate in the game. There is an application called Samba which will allow your Linux machines to participate in Windows networks. For simple things like mapped drive shares it is easy to configure but it is powerful enough to allow a Linux machine to participate in a whole AD system even using Kerberos and LDAP for authentication.

Thanks for the reply guys.

All I wanted was the name resolution between different machines. I have now solved the problem by

adding the 'wins server' parameter to the smb.conf with the name server ip address
adding wins to hosts in the nsswitch.conf (hosts files wins) and
starting the nmb service

Cheers