Greetings and Questions

[Bob George]

"Thomas Sapp" <tpsapp@hotmail.com> wrote:


> First off I would like to say hello.  I just joined the mailing list and
am
> looking forward to enlightenment! (I'm a dork)

Welcome aboard!

> [...]  Neither
> of these machines can ping hostnames on our network but they can ping
> hostnames such as yahoo.com or linux.com.  I can map to network drives if
I
> use the IP address of the machine I am mapping too.  [...]
> I have specified the correct DNS servers, I
> have also specified a non-used IP address on our network.

I suspect you're seeing a difference on the Linux machines because Windows
networking uses "WINS" as a variation on DNS. Your Windows machines are
probably picking up a WINS server via DHCP, or are locating each other using
broadcasts. In this way, Windows machines map IP addresses to names using a
mechanism similar to, but separate from, DNS. This is why your Windows
machines can ping each other by name.

Your Linux boxen are unaware of this, and are using "true" DNS servers, and
are completely unaware of DNS. Your choices are probably to enter your
Windows computers into DNS (something like dynamic DNS with DHCP might help
if you've got a lot of Windows workstations on the network), or enter them
into your hosts file on each machine (not too scalable). I'm not sure if
Microsoft provides a bastar^H^H^H^H^H^H enhanced DNS server that will
reflect WINS. If so, you'd just add that as one of your DNS servers in
/etc/resolv.conf.

Hope this helps. Windows browsing is a real fun thing to play with on a
network of any size, and getting it to play nice with non-Windows systems is
even more fun. Good luck!

- Bob

My only guess
> right now is that since we are using token-ring instead of ethernet it
might
> be messing things up but I am not sure.  Any help would be greatly
> appreciated.  Once again, I am excited to be a part of this mailing list
and
> look forward to communicating with you all.
>
> Thanks
> Tom Sapp
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