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

[Craig White]

On Dec 2, 2011, at 5:10 AM, Timothy Madden wrote:
> 
> Maybe I got used too much to the way this thing "just works" on a 
> Windows network. But I really expected a modern Linux OS to have some 
> better decentralized name resolving support off-the-box for a small, 
> router-based home network. I still think the wins support is there, only 
> it is not started by default and as I can now see, it is also too 
> difficult for me to set up.
----
perhaps difficult to set up because Linux systems really need a reasonably complete samba configuration and have nmb daemon running in order to 'speak WINS'. It also helps to ensure that all of the systems (Macintosh, Windows, Linux) are all using the same 'Workgroup' too.

You might want to check /var/cache/samba/wins.tdb (tdbdump /var/cache/samba/wins.tdb) or /var/cache/samba/wins.dat and also various incarnations of nmblookup such as nmblookup -d 2 '*' to directly check the subnet

I'm sort of surprised no one pointed out that mDNS/avahi type of name resolution was probably the way to go for a heterogenous network but yes, it too is not generally installed/configured on a normal Linux install.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_configuration_networking

One must always keep in mind that a 'default' installation of a traffic inducing protocol such as any name based resolution system that relies upon broadcast will slow your network down. Just because Microsoft does it (WINS) and Apple does it (Bonjour) doesn't mean that it is the right thing to do.

Craig