Linux not resolving linux hostnames but does resolve windows hostnames

Question

I have a network of computers, mainly Windows machines on a windows domain.

I have 2 Linux machines, which are connected to the network and get their IP's via DHCP from the Windows 2003 server.

My windows machine (Win7-00), can ping all machines by their hostnames, including the Linux machines (N40L and Lin001).

My two Linux machines can ping my Windows machines by hostname (Win7-00) but cannot ping the other Linux machines by hostname. i.e. N40L cannot ping Lin001 and Lin001 cannot ping N40L. They CAN ping eachothers the IP's. And I have an nfs export working via IP at the moment (which I wish to use via hostname)

Is this the Linux PC's not sending hostnames to the DHCP or is there something I need to change on them to allow pinging of Linux hostnames?

I don't want to manually add the hostnames to /etc/hosts as they're dynamic IP's and one of the machines is a laptop which sometimes won't be on the domain network.

What should I do?

Answer 1

I'm sorry, I think I've fixed it.

I have Avahi installed, and read that I needed port 5353 udp open. I opened them on iptables and now I can ping hostname.local

i.e.

On Lin001 I can ping n40l.local and on N40L I can ping lin001.local

Thanks for all your help.

Answer 2

Depends on what distro you're using but this is how i have it set up (on centOS)

on your localhost line in /etc/hosts add the "hostname.domain" e.g fred.jane.com

127.0.0.1 hostname.domain hostname localhost.localdomain localhost

then in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth# (# is the number of the interface useing DHCP)

DHCP_HOSTNAME=hostname

that works for me... also make sure you have setup windows DHCP to be able to auto update DNS