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I have an instance of CentOS running in VMware on a Windows Server 2003 machine on my home network.
CentOS hostname: varia
Windows XP hostname: friend
From my Windows XP machine I am unable to ping the CentOS instance by its hostname. I can only ping it by IP address.
From my Mac I am able to ping the CentOS instance by its hostname.
From the CentOS instance I can ping my Windows XP machine.
What I have tried so far:
- The firewall on my Windows XP machine it turned off.
- There is no entry for this host in my hosts file.
- I ran
ipconfig /flushdns
on friend.
When I attempt to ping the CentOS instance I receive the following error:
C:\Documents and Settings\Zachary>ping varia Ping request could not find host varia. Please check the name and try again.
Update: nslookup varia
results:
C:\Documents and Settings\Zachary>nslookup varia *** Can't find server name for address 192.168.1.1: Non-existent domain *** Default servers are not available Server: UnKnown Address: 192.168.1.1 Name: varia Address: 192.168.1.149
The resulting ip address is correct: 192.168.1.149
but pinging is still not possible.
So, samba wasn't installed. I installed it via "yum install samba" and set my workgroup in smb.conf. I think that's progress but it hasn't yet solved my problem. Brian brings up a good point about my lack of a DNS server so I will try to resolve that first. – Zack The Human – 2009-10-23T04:36:37.070
Samba has nothing to do with the question, which is about getting the hostname of a real XP box recognized. – CarlF – 2009-10-23T04:38:11.857
nmbd is part of the samba suite and it is used for NetbIOS in Linux. Therefore if Zack is using NetBIOS/WINS (and if he wasn't he'd know it) Samba is relevant.
Whether NetBIOS/WINS should be used is a separate issue. – Neal – 2009-10-23T09:08:55.663
In this case Zack has a working home network (presumably a small number of machines), to which he is adding a Virtual Machine. The VM is having trouble joining the existing infrastructure.
The broadcast messages and browser elections are not exactly going to swamp the network: therefore I think that in this case the VM should fit in with the rest of the system.
I am not saying that WINS is a good system, and would definitely not use it in a proper network, but I think its use is probably ok in this situation. – Neal – 2009-10-23T09:11:17.937
Installing samba seems to have done the trick. I also took Brian's advice and explored some of the DNS settings of my router, adding a a domain name. I am able to ping varia from friend now. Thanks very much! – Zack The Human – 2009-10-23T16:09:08.953