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

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:54 AM, Timothy Madden <terminatorul at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thank you all for your answers.
>
> Indeed, my router (D-Link DIR-100) only does DNS relay and nothing more.

Errr, unless I'm looking at the wrong online manual, DNS relay does
_exactly_ what you want.  You just have to give it a local domain name
and fill in the dhcp reservation table with the related name/ip/mac
sets.  The fact that it wants a name in this table should have been a
hint.

After you've set that up, test it with 'dig @192.168.0.1 name.localdomain'.

> It looks like I have to stick to CIFS for now. Editing hosts file
> manually looks too outdated for me, and I have to edit each hosts file
> on all my computers when a new computer is added (which just happened a
> few days ago). A dnsmasq server looks like a better way to handle my
> problem, but it already requires one of the machines to assume a server
> role: it needs a static IP and can not benefit from (its own)
> configuration services, and it must be running for all other machines to
> be running and see each other.

The router should do the same thing.  Some d-links have bugs, though,
so test it and if it doesn't work, check if there is a firmware update
for your model.

> My subnet is Gigabit anyway, so I guess I think I will live with the
> extra traffic from NetBIOS.

The DIR-100 isn't gigabit, so the things connected to its ports are
going to 100M.  But, that's fast enough for a small net anyway.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com