Name resolution from Windows network
Hi,
I havd a Debian box set up connected to my office LAN. I am getting an IP
address from the site DHCP server, and am getting name resolution from the
site DNS servers.
The problem is that the site is totally Windows-based, and my Debian box is
not integrating as nicely as I would like. I have absolutely no influence
over the site network setup, and even if I did, I'd never get anything
changed for the sake of Linux :-(
My specific problems are as follows
First, the site name resolution is done by a combination of DNS and WINS.
Fixed-IP machines have DNS names, so I can resolve their names by the usual
means (ping machinename, and so on). DHCP-allocated machines have unusable
names in DNS (dhcppc-NNN-NNN, based on the IP address, defeating the point
:-( ), and "sensible" names are resolved using WINS. So I can successfully
resolve with Samba, but not with normal IP tools.
As the site DNS server doesn't forward requests to WINS, and as the Linux
name resolution itself can't use WINS directly, I was wondering about
setting up named on the Linux box and making it run as a simple cacheing DNS
resolver which falls back, when it can't resolve from the site DNS, to
trying WINS. I've searched the various DNS mailing lists I can find, but
there's nothing useful there. It seems to me that if I could run a "hook" of
some sort from named if direct resolution fails, I could do this (a trivial
Perl script could do the WINS->IP lookup via Samba, and return the result).
Is this possible at all???
Second, my Linux box gets an IP address from DHCP. However, it doesn't
(can't??) respond to the DHCP server passing its configured hostname (which
gets published to the WINS, or maybe DNS, server - not sure which). As a
result, other machines on the network can't resolve the machine name to its
IP address. Can Samba be set up to respond to WINS broadcasts requesting the
machine name - or can the Linux machine be set up to publish its name
"properly" (where by properly, I probably mean precisely the opposite -
suitable for a MS server, as opposed to the proper way :-( )?
Thanks in advance for any help. Could any responses be copied direct to me,
as I'll have to go off the list for a few days soon (I'm offsite and I can't
handle the backlog of traffic which will be left on my return...) I'll check
the archives as well, but personal copies would help.
Paul Moore.
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