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

Fri Dec 2 15:01:06 UTC 2011
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Friday, December 02, 2011 06:36:25 AM Timothy Madden wrote:
> Sorry to say the instructions did not work for me.
...
> Still, no success in ping-ing other (samba) machines in my network. But 
> I could ping the same machines from a Windows workstation...
...
> I the end, I had to revert to static IP instead of DHCP.

Ok, sorry to hear those possibilities didn't work out for you.  There may yet be a way to make it work, but it is definitely a case of swimming upstream against the current to do Linux name resolution with WINS rather than DNS.

If you should find out how to actually make it work, I for one would be interested in seeing it.

In the meantime, statically configured DHCP is a reasonable alternative, and, honestly, I may be going that way here for other security-related things (in terms of being able to better determine which box is flagged as being a participant of a botnet or such since some of my DHCP 'servers' don't keep logs of who got what address (cisco router based DHCP in a few areas), but they can have static configurations.  All that is a stopgap until I can get packetfence running properly, but that's involving quite a bit of work to support our switching environment.