DNS newbie question

[draca443]

I have 2 linux boxes on my network and I want to find out how to connect to the 2nd box from the first box by machine name instead of IP, without adding an entry to /etc/hosts

I discovered that my windows2000 computer learns my linux machine's name when I start samba on linux, by receiving NBNS packets that came from the linux box when samba was started.

But what kind of packets do linux computers send to broadcast their machine name when samba isn't running, and what program/daemon transmits them?

 

[GlenJohnson]

Why not use the hosts file? Easiest way to get it done....

Glen A. Johnson
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"Education is the best provision for old age."
Aristotles (384 BC-322 BC); Greek philosopher.

 

[draca443]

Actually I'm not planning on doing this, I'm just asking the question so that I will know how it would be done without using the hosts file. I'm expected to know these things for my job.

 

[BigShyBear]

Linux (and Unix) computers do not broadcast their machine name. In order to do name resolution with linux or unix systems you need to have either a hosts file on each linux/unix computer, or a DNS server with host records added for each machine name.

Microsoft has added a function to it's implementation of TCP/IP starting with Windows 2000 servers that tries to insert the computer names into Microsoft DNS servers. This is what samba is trying to emulate. This is an outgrowth of Microsoft's Netbios networking protocol and the way that protocol tries to identify computers on the network. This is NOT a function present in any pre-Microsoft Windows 2000 implementations of TCP/IP.