Re: wins? or what?

[David Clymer <david@zettazebra.com>]

On Wed, 2004-05-05 at 19:31, Curtis Vaughan wrote:
> Question.  I have several Windows clients in our network you have to 
> use DHCP.  The DHCP server is a Linux server, which also acts as the 
> DNS server.  However, a separate Linux server needs to know how to 
> resolve the NetBios name of one such Windows client (let's say his 
> NetBios name is ACCT).
> 
> If I just type ping acct.  It won't find acct.  If I type smbclient -L 
> \\ACCT, it finds it.  I have tried changing parts of the smb.conf file, 
> but I'm not sure that that has anything to do with this problem (or 
> does it?).  I can't put a ACCT entry into the DNS server as it's 
> address is dynamic.
> 
> What options are there for me to get this Linux server to resolve 
> ACCT's ip address?
> 

Nothing short of modifying/rewriting the utility will let you use ping
to "ping" a netbios name.

try nmblookup. It's part of the samba-common package. 

you could write yourself a smbping utility. write a script to parse the
output of nmblookup, and pass the IP address to ping.

rough example:

#! /bin/bash

ping `nmblookup "$1" |cut -d' ' -f1 |grep -vi querying`


-davidc