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

Fri Dec 2 18:18:49 UTC 2011
Timothy Madden <terminatorul at gmail.com>

On 02.12.2011 17:01, Lamar Owen wrote:
> 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.  [...]
>
> If you should find out how to actually make it work, I for one would be interested in seeing it.
> [...]

Actually, as I was saying, I have a sub-net of 8 computers and 1 router 
(and also one switch if you want).

The router is stubborn enough to make sure that no incoming connections 
or outside traffic get to the sub-net (except on the forwarded ports), 
even if I would actually like to be able to route traffic from the 
company LAN (where my work computer resides) to the machines in the sub-net.

In this sub-net I *could* get DHCP for IP allocation and WINS for name 
resolution work together. There was nothing special to do than:
     - start smb and winbind (no NetworkManager...)
     - include 'wins' in the 'hosts: ' line in /etc/nssswitch.conf
     - maybe add a DHCP_HOSTNAME=`hostname` line to
       /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 script, for my router
       to see the computer names.

There was no need to prevent DHCP client from retrieving DNS information.

In this way, I need no dedicated machine for DNS, DHCP or WINS, and I 
can use all 8 machines for testing our product. Our test procedure 
specifies that the machines involved should be restarted just before 
tests begin. I believe that would be a problem if want to pick one of 
them as the DHCP/DNS/WINS server ...

So I want to repeat the procedure for two other machines in the 
(outside) company LAN, where I had the same name resolving problems in 
the past, on a different project, and which where still in use. Much to 
my surprise, the same configuration did not work there, in a larger and 
different network (the company LAN), with or without the enabling DHCP 
to also retrieve the DNS information. It is here on these two machines 
where I reverted to stati IP instead of DHCP.

I do not know any special difference between the two computers (I run 
yum update on both), or what causes my configuration to work in one 
network, but not in the other ... Any suggestions are welcome !

Thank you,
Timothy Madden