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I have a LAN setup with a bunch of windows and linux boxes. The LAN is built on top of the AT&T DSL Router. I don't have any type of DNS Server running. All the windows machines can identify themselves by machine name over the network. Even a Linux NAS box can also be accessible by machine name. However, I recently built a CentOS linux box and I want it to be accessible by machine name. I've tried setting the hostname but it does not work. Can someone help me with this problem?

5 Answers 5

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If you run Samba on the Linux box, you should be able to access the Linux box from the Windows boxes, by using the Linux box's hostname.

(There is a lot more to it than that, but that's the simplest solution)

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windows hosts are accessable by name because they can be found by their netbios name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBIOS

For your linux box you can:

  • Add a dns server
  • Install samba and configure it to use netbios name
  • Add ip/name of your linux machine to other box in your lan (/etc/hosts if linux, c:\windows\system32\drivers
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  • Installing samba did solve the problem. Feb 1, 2012 at 21:55
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I think, there are two options:

  • Manually creating an /etc/hosts and distributing it on the different machines (takes a lot of maintenance), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_%28file%29

  • locally installing a small DNS server, e.g. dnsmasq. dnsmasq can also work as a DHCP server and will include the hostnames that it records via DHCP in its DNS replies

Maybe, the AT&T box also has some local DNS features? I don't know that box, though.

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  • It is Netopia 3000. If it helps. I could not find anything useful though about this box, which can help me.
    – user766453
    Jun 6, 2011 at 19:03
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I'm going to assume you're using DHCP, and that the clients are sending their hostname to the DHCP server, which is updating a local DNS server (try nslookup ${somehostname} to verify the server address).

CentOS5 does not, AFAIK, send the hostname over DHCP by default. Add:

DHCP_HOSTNAME=${yourhostname}

to /etc/sysconfig/ifcfg-eth0.

If it's a static IP, see the hosts file, dnsmasq, BIND, or some Windows-based DNS server. Caveat: your router is probably functioning as a DNS server, so you'd need to make some client configuration changes if you set up a local DNS server in order to have them look at it first.

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  • I am getting "server can't find ${yourhostname}: NXDOMAIN" error. Although this command does display the router IP correctly. Also, DHCP_HOSTNAME is also set correctly in /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0.
    – user766453
    Jun 6, 2011 at 21:47
  • I Found this to be the most reliable and efficient solution if you are using your own DNS server (we use DNSmasq). This eliminates need for any external packages to enable name resolution even from Windows hosts. By the way this is what I put into our config: DHCP_HOSTNAME=$HOSTNAME
    – Lukasz
    Jan 29, 2013 at 23:51
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A bit old here but i answer anyway :

[global]
  workgroup = smb
  netbios name = SERVEUR
  security = share
  share modes = yes

[homes]
  comment = Home Directories
  browsable = no
  read only = no
  create mode = 0750

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