Hello
Sorry for the (I guess) simple question, but:
I have 7 computers under one 8-port router (D-Link DIR-100, firmware v1.13EU) in my network (actually in a sub-network) and they do not see each other's host names.
The router has the 'DNS relay' option enabled, and all 7 computers use the router as the DNS server, which in turn will forward DNS requests to the ISP DNS server. That way I can understand that simple, plain, default DNS is not enough for my boxes to see each-other's names.
Windows has a nice (or not) way to resolve the problem: CIFS (Samba) server names are automatically included in the name resolving procedure. I know I can do the same with my CentOS boxes if I install samba on each of them and add 'wins' to the 'hosts: ' line in /etc/nsswitch.conf, but somehow I think installing cifs on every node just to get my local machine names to resolve properly to the IP addresses is not the right way to solve my problem ...
What is the way to have all computers in my simple network know each other by name ?
Is it possible to have the name resolving procedure used by the system automatically recognize a new machine added to my network, when I try to access it with right host name, like WINS can ?
Also, I hear Linux does not have, by default, a cache of resolved names (like Windows does), and I find that to be a sad thing. Why should the default be set so that I contact the ISP DNS server for each and every web page I hit ?
Is there an easy way to install a caching name server on my each machine, and make sure my system is using /that server/ to resolve names ?
Thank you, Timothy Madden