[I've searched a LOT for a solution to this issue, but if someone wants to point me to a related question and/or answer, please do!]
I have a local network over a broadband router with 3 Windows 7 computers and an Ubuntu VirtualBox VM on a Windows host. I can access the Windows computers from one another just fine, and I've configured Samba on Ubuntu so I can see and access the my-ubuntu computer from the Windows machines as well.
The problem is accessing Windows machines from Ubuntu by hostname. I can ping the Windows machines from Ubuntu by IP address, but I can't do a lookup by their names, win7-1, win7-2, win7-3.
I.e., smbclient -L 192.168.2.5
is successful, but smbclient -L win7-1
is not. smbtree
sometimes shows the following, sometimes doesn't:
WORKGROUP
\\MY-UBUNTU
\\WIN7-1
\\WIN7-2
\\WIN7-3
- For the sake of debugging I've disabled all firewalls and enabled all read/write permissions everywhere (since they're all just my machines).
- I also know I can add entries to
/etc/hosts
for each individual machine, but I would like to learn how to get hostname lookup working dynamically
Question
How can I set up what I want to work? Ubuntu is running in a VirtualBox VM on a Windows host with Bridged networking set up, so I can't run a DNS server within Ubuntu (or can I?).
I think other newbies would also really appreciate a high-level overview, of where the DNS server should be, how the Ubuntu machine should use it, whether I need to change anything in the Windows machines' settings..I'm confused by all these packages and settings I've come across - resolv
, libnss-mdns
, avahi
, dnsmasq
, winbind
..I just want to install and use what I need!