You'll like it

We promise
Everything here is my opinion. I do not speak for your employer.
November 2007
December 2007

2007-11-19 »

This just saved me a lot of annoyance

If you use Debian or Ubuntu, do yourself a favour. Run this command:

    apt-get install winbind

Then edit your /etc/nsswitch.conf and change the line that looks like this:

    hosts: files dns

To this:

    hosts: files dns wins

Now even if your computer is on a network with fantastically stupid DNS, you can be happy like Windows users already are: your programs will do broadcast/wins lookups to find a hostname if it's not found in DNS.

(I had a really hard time finding out from google how to do this, so if you'll forgive me some redundancy: winbindd is part of samba. It can use WINS for hostname lookups (to augment or replace DNS). It provides nss_wins (libnss_wins) for NSS. It finds Windows hostnames automatically using samba on your Linux system.)

Lazyweb: anybody know how to do this in MacOS X?

I'm CEO at Tailscale, where we make network problems disappear.

Why would you follow me on twitter? Use RSS.

apenwarr on gmail.com