nsswitch.conf

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2005-01-07 at 19:51 -0600, Robert wrote:
> Scot L. Harris wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, 2005-01-07 at 20:02, Robert wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>I recently installed Fedora core 3 and I'm having a problem with 
> >>nsswitch.conf, it doesn't support wins on the hosts: line.  Is there any 
> >>way to get it?
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >wins is something that is really specific to Microsoft type systems. 
> >For linux or unix type systems you use DNS, host files, NIS+ to do name
> >to IP address translations.  
> >
> >While you can configure samba on linux to provide wins support for other
> >systems as far as I know it will not use wins to resolve gethostbyname
> >calls.  
> >
> >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?
----
in samba server (smb.conf) add 1 line

wins support = true

restart samba

chances are, the windows computers will all be happy. If not, add the ip
address of the linux computer to TCP/IP configuration on the windows
computers or better yet, to the dhcp server

My guess is that SuSE had 'wins support = true' already set. I don't
think that samba.org ships it that way as a default

Craig