[Samba] problems with name resolution in a small home network

[Chris]

On Monday 15 August 2005 02:42 am, Claude Jones wrote:
> According to several sources I've read, including your citations, if
> I'm running wins as part of my Samba server, then netbios mode h is
> the proper mode. I've added the line
> option netbios-node-type=8 to my dhcpd.conf

In general that's fine. If you're running a wins server and a dns server 
than than you should eliminate the hosts/lmhosts use (outside of the 
standard localhost line(s) in hosts) - it's a waste of time, redundant, 
and not flexible.
Do you have a dhcp option for wins servers as well? Such as:
-----------------------------------------------------
option netbios-name-servers 192.168.2.1, 192.168.2.1;
-----------------------------------------------------

> Let's see. It's very late so I won't do any thorough testing tonight.
> Maybe these other changes have fixed it. The rndc stuff I referred to
> has to with getting named.conf and rndc.conf to refer to a secret key
> in order to do dns. I don't fully understand it, but it is supposedly
> working.

I can only guess that neither your WINS nor your DNS are working 
properly, otherwise all of your name resolutions should have worked 
without hosts/lmhosts entries.

> Whats a ".local TLD"?

TLD = Top Level Domain
A domain name that ends (the top level) in .local. Such as 
"jones.local", where your the FQDN of your hosts would be something 
like vproductions2.jones.local, etc.

I think Fedora introduced the glibc with mdns support, which from as 
little as I know about, seems to allow automatic name discovery via 
broadcasts kind of like what NetBIOS does. It will interfere with 
otherwise normal name resolution attempts.