Hostnames not resolving, only by SMB/CIFS and one PC

avattz

avattz

Hi there,

I'm currently using FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE as a home ZFS file server, but I also wanted to go router-less. I recently set it up to share internet through all Ethernet ports and use a USB wireless adapter as an access point. The problem I'm having is that I cannot ping or SSH my FreeBSD machine from any of the computers connected to it (by Ethernet or wireless) except for one Windows 7 machine. The thing that I find strange is that all computers can mount network share from FreeBSD using hostnames (i.e. SMB://hostname/share).

I can ping all computers using their static IPs but hostnames don't (except for the Windows machine). I know I'm missing something (do I have to setup a DNS server or DHCP?) because when I was using a DD-WRT router, hostnames, DHCP, and IP addresses were working fine with all computers.
 
You are missing DNS. From windows it will work because it will resort to resolving hostnames using NetBIOS broadcasts.
 
For your scenario maybe have a look at dns/dnsmasq.
That serves as a DHCP- and DNS-server.

The DNS-part is pretty simple as it uses the hosts /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf files.
But the config file is pretty self-explaining.
 
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