I currently run ten physical and three more virtual machines throughout my house. Of those, three machines are dedicated Ubuntu machines. One is my mail server running Axigen 4.0. The second is my NAS server running Ubuntu 7.10 and Samba, the third is my test/dev machine that I run Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit. All the rest, including the virtual machines, are running Windows of some sort. I run VNC on every machine, which fits in nicely because I can use VNC Viewer to remotely log onto my Ubuntu machines as well. My challenge has been that most of my machines use DHCP-assigned IP addresses, and I have been unable to do name resolution on those machines from any of my Ubuntu boxes. This has been frustrating because I have to rely on a Windows machine to resolve hostnames into IP addresses. I’m trying to get completely away from any Windows dependency, and I’m nearly there. I found on the <a href=”http://ubuntuforums.org/”>Ubuntu Forums</a> today a way to solve my problem, and it’s exceptionally easy.
The problem here being that Windows is a little more “user friendly” when it comes to handling name resolution on networks. I don’t have any Windows servers, so there’s no specific DNS server running in my environment, and I didn’t really want to install a full Bind server just to handle the 10 or so dynamic IP addresses I have floating around.
What I found was <a href=”http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=88206&highlight=winbind”>this</a> post that clearly outlines the three steps needed to get this running correctly:
First edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file.
Change the line that reads:
<span style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:courier new;font-size:85%;” >hosts: files dns</span>
To this:
<span style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:courier new;font-size:85%;” >hosts: files dns wins</span>
Save the file.
Next, install the winbind package:
<span style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:courier new;font-size:85%;” >sudo apt-get install winbind</span>
And that’s it, I can now ping hostnames from my Ubuntu machines. There is some debate as to whether Samba needs to be installed before this will work, since it installs some wins information. Both my machines where this is needed run Samba, so I wasn’t able to test without a Samba install, and my mail server, which doesn’t run Samba, sits outside my firewall, so I don’t need this package there.
Hope this helps someone, it’s sure saving me all that time trying to do lookups from two different machines.
Ubuntu Windows IP Name Resolution
I currently run ten physical and three more virtual machines throughout my house. Of those, three machines are dedicated Ubuntu machines. One is my mail server running Axigen 4.0. The second is my NAS server running Ubuntu 7.10 and Samba, the third is my test/dev machine that I run Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit. All the rest, including the virtual machines, are running Windows of some sort. I run VNC on every machine, which fits in nicely because I can use VNC Viewer to remotely log onto my Ubuntu machines as well. My challenge has been that most of my machines use DHCP-assigned IP addresses, and I have been unable to do name resolution on those machines from any of my Ubuntu boxes. This has been frustrating because I have to rely on a Windows machine to resolve hostnames into IP addresses. I’m trying to get completely away from any Windows dependency, and I’m nearly there. I found on the <a href=”http://ubuntuforums.org/”>Ubuntu Forums</a> today a way to solve my problem, and it’s exceptionally easy.
The problem here being that Windows is a little more “user friendly” when it comes to handling name resolution on networks. I don’t have any Windows servers, so there’s no specific DNS server running in my environment, and I didn’t really want to install a full Bind server just to handle the 10 or so dynamic IP addresses I have floating around.
What I found was <a href=”http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=88206&highlight=winbind”>this</a> post that clearly outlines the three steps needed to get this running correctly:
First edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file.
Change the line that reads:
<span style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:courier new;font-size:85%;” >hosts: files dns</span>
To this:
<span style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:courier new;font-size:85%;” >hosts: files dns wins</span>
Save the file.
Next, install the winbind package:
<span style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:courier new;font-size:85%;” >sudo apt-get install winbind</span>
And that’s it, I can now ping hostnames from my Ubuntu machines. There is some debate as to whether Samba needs to be installed before this will work, since it installs some wins information. Both my machines where this is needed run Samba, so I wasn’t able to test without a Samba install, and my mail server, which doesn’t run Samba, sits outside my firewall, so I don’t need this package there.
Hope this helps someone, it’s sure saving me all that time trying to do lookups from two different machines.
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