ping hostname on mixed windows/fedora environment

[Karl Pearson]

On Tue, October 12, 2010 10:16 am, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Bret Stern <
>> bret_stern at machinemanagement.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I have a single router issuing ip addresses (dhcp) to a variety of
>>> Windows/XP/Server and Fedora machines.
>>>
>>> Since all my Windows/Fedora machines are issued ip numbers from the
>>> router, I thought I would be able to ping by hostname to any one of the
>>> machines.
>>>
>>> My windows machines seem to ping by hostname more often than not. The
>>> Fedora machines (Fedora 12 ftp server, Fedora 13 workstation) do not,
>>> because I've never taken the time to figure it out.
>>>
>>> Although I don't NEED to ping by hostname accross my Windows/Fedora
>>> workstations, I would like to try.
>>>
>>> Any expertise on how to do this...or a good article I can read.
>>>
>>> As always, regards,
>>>
>>> Bret Stern
>>>
>
>> simple answer - to ping by hostname those boxes should be using a static
>> ip
>> address and each box needs to have the hosts file configured. What you
>> are
>> seeing
>> is most likely due to the fact that even using dhcp those boxes are
>> receiving the
>> same ip address. My own habit is to use static ip addresses on a lan
>> with
>> five or
>> less devices.
>
> I think the issue may be that Windows has a netbios name service. When a
> Windows machine does not find the hostname in lmhosts, it sends a netbios
> name query as a UDP broadcast. The device with the requested name responds
> with a UDP packet to the requesting machine's IP address with the IP
> address of the device with that name.
>
> I don't think Fedora supports the netbios name service.
>
> Harold
>

Harold is right. Also, your DHCP server would have to have the capability
of updating DNS with the IP addresses of each client that uses it. Some
can do that, many can't.

If you really do want to use NETBIOS names, setup Samba on each Linux
system, then you can get pinging by the UDP method to work,
intermittently. I think Samba actually does it better than Windows...

Karl


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