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At work we have an WinSBS domain at the heart of our network, which is all Windows PCs. The domain controller is acting as a DNS for these computers.
I have recently added some personal use Linux machines to the network, without joining them to the domain. I have set up Samba with "wins server" pointing to the domain controller, which lets the Windows boxes resolve the Linux hostnames just fine.
I also have resolvconf set up with the domain controller as a nameserver and the local domain as a searched domain, which lets the Linux boxes resolve the Windows hostnames just fine.
However, the Linux boxes will not resolve other Linux hostnames at all. Given that I don't have control over the DNS server (I am not the network admin) and that at least one of the Linux boxes is not an always-on machine and is likely to change its LAN IP frequently (via DHCP), what service am I missing to make their hostnames visible to each other?
edit:
Just installed smbclient so I could list hostnames from the domain controller, all of the Linux boxes are showing up (I guess that should be expected since I can ping them from Windows). I can also use nmblookup to resolve a Linux hostname through the WINS server. I have also edited /etc/nsswitch.conf to add the 'wins' parameter to the 'hosts' option. Still, cannot resolve Linux hostnames through nslookup/host/dig.
All of those solutions require access to the domain server, which I don't have. WINS resolution is fine for me, now I'm trying to get generic hostname resolution using WINS (nsswitch "hosts = wins" isn't working) – James – 2014-06-04T21:51:53.470