mount problems

[Tony Crouch]

Hi, 
I have a curious problem I encounter when trying to use the mount
command to view shares on my girlfriend's Windows XP machine.

I am ping her machine via both DNS (which is statically set
in /etc/hosts) and by IP address.

But ...

I can only mount shares via her IP address, not by her DNS name.

Please find the terminal output below. Any assistance / suggestions
anyone could provide would be great. Should this be filed with bugzilla?
> [root@tony-wired pdab100]# mount //amber-wireless/documents /amber-comp
> Password:
> mount error 5 = Input/output error
> Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)
> [root@tony-wired pdab100]# mount //192.168.1.20/documents /amber-comp
> Password:
> [root@tony-wired pdab100]# cat /etc/hosts
> # Do not remove the following line, or various programs
> # that require network functionality will fail.
> 127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain           localhost
> 192.168.1.10    tony-wireless.localnetwork.com  tony-wireless
> 192.168.1.11    tony-wired.localnetwork.com             tony-wired
> 192.168.1.20    amber-wireless.localnetwork.com amber-wireless
> 192.168.1.21    amber-wired.localnetwork.com    amber-wired
> 192.168.1.1     netcomm-router.localnetwork.com netcomm-router
> 192.168.1.2     netgear-router.localnetwork.com netgear-router
> [root@tony-wired pdab100]# ping amber-wireless
> PING amber-wireless.localnetwork.com (192.168.1.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
> 64 bytes from amber-wireless.localnetwork.com (192.168.1.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=1.74 ms
>
> --- amber-wireless.localnetwork.com ping statistics ---
> 2 packets transmitted, 1 received, 50% packet loss, time 999ms
> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.746/1.746/1.746/0.000 ms

Cheers, 
Tony Crouch

[Tim]

On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 16:58 +1000, Tony Crouch wrote:
> I have a curious problem I encounter when trying to use the mount
> command to view shares on my girlfriend's Windows XP machine.
>
> I am ping her machine via both DNS (which is statically set
> in /etc/hosts) and by IP address.
>
> But ...
>
> I can only mount shares via her IP address, not by her DNS name.

See if putting machine names and IP addresses into the "lmhosts" files
helps (it's the LAN manager hosts file - LAN manager being the precursor
to the filing system using SMB).

But I can think of other possible factors:

The computers not having a browse master between them (which coordinates
what machines are available on a network).

Firewalling blocking some of the communication.

Your computers configuration is using other things to try and resolve
names before it tries the hosts file (see "/etc/nsswitch.comf" and
"/etc/host.conf", and their man pages).

A local domain name server responds to queries about "localdomain"
addresses, but has no answer for the particular addresses that you're
using.

I can't remember whether machine names can include a hyphen, using SMB,
and I think the limit to the length of the name was sixteen characters.