nsswitch.conf

[Scot L. Harris]

On Fri, 2005-01-07 at 20:51, Robert wrote:
> Scot L. Harris wrote:

> >
> >What are you trying to accomplish?  Maybe there is another solution.
> >
> >  
> >
> I want to have my system automatically resolve netbios names without 
> running a wins server.  Samba is working fine except for this problem.  
> A couple of solutions are to manually edit the lmhosts file or to hack 
> up a cron script that runs nbtscan and puts the results in lmhosts 
> (yuck).  Suse seems to handles windows networking without problems with 
> the default install.  Why can't Fedora?

What you want to do can not be done as far as I know.  The way I have
done this kind of thing in the past is to populate the /etc/hosts file
or DNS with the names and addresses of all systems on the network.  

For a home network where you have anywhere from a handful to maybe a
couple of dozen systems statically assigning IP addresses and populating
/etc/hosts or DNS is the easiest way to deal with this issue.  

For company networks with large numbers of systems I still feel
statically assigning IP/names is the way to go.  Setting up DHCP for
laptop drop ins works and you can assign generic names in DNS for the
DHCP range.  

I believe if you are doing samba type things on your Linux system you
will be able to automatically resolve netbios type names.  You should
only need a wins server if you are reaching across different LAN
segments.  But I don't think you are going to be able to do an IP type
ping to a netbios name regardless of what you do.

Have not worked with SUSE enough to know how they handle things.  If
they have something sorted out then it should be applicable to Fedora.  
As long as it does not require YAST2.  :)

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

I feel like a wet parking meter on Darvon!