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?