[Scottish] Problem resolving local network PC names to IP addresses

[Colin McKinnon]

On Friday 12 November 2004 14:36, Andy Potter wrote:
>
>  I have a small home network consisting of a mixture of Linux and
> Windows PC's that are supplied with IP addresses from a Belkin
> F5D7630-4A ADSL Modem Wireless Router via DHCP.
>
>  How can I get the local PC's to 'see' each other by hostname rather
> than only by IP address ?
>

Simple way would be to populate the hosts files on all machines (if you can't 
find a file called 'hosts' on the MSWindows boxes, it should go in the same 
directory as the file 'hosts.sam').

Of course if you want the names to be static, you'll need to tell your DHCP 
server which MAC address belongs to which machine (or turn off DHCP and use 
static addresses instead).

You could do DHCP+DNS, or even dynamic DNS, but IMHO DNS is a bit of a pig to 
manage (even on a private network) and the problem is exacerbated by having 
to deal with BIND. For less than 20 PCs, I'd definitely go with static 
addresses and hosts files.

>  I have also noticed that the router only displays the Windows PC's
> hostname in the client list. It does not show the Linux PC's hostname.
> Is there anything I need to run that will allow the router to determine
> the hostname of the Linux PC's ?
>

Maybe it's getting the list from NMB broadcasts? I can't see how else it could 
work out what the names were.

HTH

C.