Can't ping by hostname from clients - was Which distro to switch an FC3 samba server to?

A. Rick Anderson arick at pobox.com
Tue Dec 7 13:36:34 UTC 2004


I believe I may have found the root *problem* to what initially appeared 
to be a samba problem.  The clients, that are failing to connect to my 
samba shares, are not able to resolve the DNS name of the samba server.  
If I do a "net view \\ipaddress", rather then "net view \\serverName", 
the 'failing' client is able to spot the samba services.  The failing 
clients fail to resolve the DNS name if I do a "ping serverName", but 
are successful if I do a "ping ipaddress".

An "ipconfig /all" shows the same results for both the functioning 
client machine and the non-functioning client machines.

My primary DNS server is the samba server.  It's (Anar) 192.168.0.2.  I 
can ping by hostname from Anar (192.168.0.2) -> Frodo(192.168.0.103). 
However, even though Frodo shows 192.168.0.2 as its primary DNS/WINS 
server, if I attempt to ping Anar from Frodo by hostname, rather then by 
IP address, Frodo can't resolve the hostname.

The only difference that I can see is that the client that is working is 
physically closer.  It connects into the same hub, while the failing 
clients are two hubs away.

I have another DHCP server in the network.  The DirecWay satellite modem 
has one built in, but none of the clients use that one.  My dhcp 
setting, which are what show up with a ipconfig command, show the modem 
as the default gateway, and secondary WINS server, but the Anar 
(192.168.0.2) box as the primary DNS and primary WINS server.

I'm guessing that if I can figure out how to get the client machines to 
properly resolve the DNS hostname lookup, that the samba problems will 
also be resolved.  As a mentioned before, this was working without 
problem on FC2.  I'm guessing that during the upgrade / update process, 
one of the configuration files got stepped on.  I've had several people 
check the smb.conf and that one appears functional.  /etc/resolve.conf 
appears reasonable.  Qian Qiao looked over my dhcpd.conf (thank-you 
muchly) and didn't spot anything.  Any suggestions on where to attack 
this next?

According to the Ubunto distro-review that was posted earlier, he had a 
somewhat similar problem on his Ubunto distro, with network problems 
occurring roughly 15 minutes after restarting the network.  I've seen 
the same symptoms on FC3 with some of the client machines.  He resolved 
it by downloading resolveconf, pump (to replace DHCP) and dnsmasq.  I 
haven't gone that far yet.  He also had problems with up2date crashing 
half-way through.  I tried Dag's smart but kept getting script failures 
(sorry Dag).  I didn't try yum.  After being up all night, I finally got 
apt-get to work in the end.  614 MBytes of updates ... sheez!

-- 
A. Rick Anderson


-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: smb.conf
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20041207/97cb1fee/attachment-0003.conf>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: resolv.conf
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20041207/97cb1fee/attachment-0004.conf>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: dhcpd.conf
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20041207/97cb1fee/attachment-0005.conf>


More information about the fedora-list mailing list