[CentOS] How to make nodes in my local LAN see each other's names

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 9:15 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote:
> On 12/02/2011 08:54 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
>> On Friday, December 02, 2011 08:42:42 AM Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> [netbios naming is] like a roomfull of people yelling out their own
>>> name all the time as a means of identification with no way to handle
>>> those out of hearing distance or to arbitrate duplicates.
>> ...
>>> But that's a matter of luck, demanding that no one uses duplicates,
>>> and that all machines can broadcast to each other (i.e., no routers
>>> between them...).
>>
>> WINS does not work this way.  WINS works fine even when nodes are separated by routers and is the recommended way (at least by MS) to do SMB/CIFS name resolution in a routed network.
>
> I agree with Lamar ... I use WINS on a routed VPN network that has a
> dozen offices that uses Samba on Linux (and OpenLDAP) as the Domain
> Controller.  Samba has an option called:
>
> remote announce
> http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/NetworkBrowsing.html#id2583364
>
> and another called:
>
> remote broswer sync
> http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/NetworkBrowsing.html#id2583504
>
> These two options keep all my WINS/SMB networks synced all across the US.

Yes, but to make it work, the wins server has to have a static IP,
which is what the discussion was about avoiding....  And it still
doesn't handle duplicate names or provide a way to delegate naming
rights to avoid them.   So it can work, but only under some limited
circumstances, and only for things using the matching protocols.  But,
if you have a registered DNS domain or a private one and constrain
your lookups to start there, you could use a DNS server that accepts
dynamic updates.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com