DNS, WINS, not sure

[skiflyer]

I just setup two fileservers using samba and added them to my windows network.

It works wonderfully... the windows boxes are having no trouble writing to the samba shares... but now I want to setup some rsync'ing between the two, and I find out the boxes can't seem to see eachother by hostname. In fact they can't seem to find any machine on the network by hostname... using ping to verify this.

If I use the IP address that's great, but with DHCP I can't exactly schedule my scripts this way. I in Gnome I use the file system browsing, the machine names show up.... but if through the command line I try to use machine names, I get nothing.

I'm guessing I need to point the machines to our WINS host, or maybe DNS? I'm not sure.

If it matters in this case, the linux boxes are running Debian Sarge, and the Windows Server is 2k... most of the windows clients are XP.

 

[thedaver]

You should answer this question for yourself.
"Why am I running boxes as SERVERS and assigning them their IP by DHCP instead of a fixed IP?"

Answer that and you might fix your problem...?

Hosting Solutions for Home or Business.

http://www.surfinbox.com/hosting/

 

[skiflyer]

Regardless of whether or not I assign those IPs fixed or by DHCP, they cannot see any of the other boxes on the network by machine name, only by IP, so while that may get around this immediate problem if needing to setup an rsync script, it doesn't handle the broader issue.

 

[franklin97355]

You need to point the boxes to some server that will resolve the name. How you do this is up to you. You could also add the name-IP pair into the hosts file on each computer.

 

[skiflyer]

Right.

I can't use the hosts solution because the clients all use DHCP.

And I don't know how to change which DNS/WINS boxes that the machines use to resolve names.... that's the question I'm asking.

 

[Castor66]

Create static leases for the clients in DHCP. Then add them to the hosts file. To be honest if these machines are always on then they will never change their IP addresses due to the way DHCP renews leases.

To see what machine they are using for name resolution - type 'dig' at the prompt and it should return the name of the server. Alternatively, have a look at the resolv.conf file and that will have the necessary info.