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waffffffle · Sep 29, 2004, 03:16 PM

I was wondering if anyone might be able to help me out with this. I am now working in a mostly Windows environment as an IT manager and I am trying to do as much work as possible from the Mac on my desk. Apple's Remote Desktop software is great for controlling Macs but it is pretty weak with Windows machines. On the windows side there is an open source program called Ultravnc that offers a number of advances for IT managers, specifically it uses the NT domain for many things such as authentication into machines and it lists the netbios names of computers along with their IP addresses. This is particularly helpful on this company's network, which has no DHCP and no local dns names, just numbers and netbios names. Windows computers are also capable of using netbios names for other purposes like pinging, and even in Internet Explorer.

So I was wondering if I could somehow get applications running on my computer to use netbios names. I know it is possible to lookup a netbios name from an IP (or vice versa) in the terminal using the nmblookup command. I was wondering how I could integrate this into the OS's system for doing the same.

I think the best way to do this would be to run my own DNS server that is only accessible from my own machine (so as not to screw up any other machines on the network). My computer would first query the built in DNS server, which would look up information using nmblookup and if a match cannot be found then it tells the application to look upwards to a higher dns server. I don't know much about DNS, so my first question is, is this possible?

Another idea I have is to have a program that writes all the netbios names to the hosts file on the local machine so but this seems like it would be hard to update.

Does anyone know anything about this? I'd appreciate any input. Thanks.

Diggory Laycock · 06:56 AM

Hmmm.

How about using Rendezvous names - You could use Howl.

http://www.porchdogsoft.com/products/howl/
[edit] - On re-reading about Howl - I think it just does the Service Publishing / Discovery part of RendezVous - not the machine naming part.

You could use the Apple Rendezvous for Windows Tech Preview:

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/rendezvous/index.html

waffffffle · Sep 29, 2004, 04:20 PM

I don't see how that would work. Rendezvous names require .local at the end. I want to be able to connect to local web servers by going to http://netbiosname and I want remote desktop to show me netbios names for all of the machines that it discovers in an IP scan. I feel like the only way this would work is if the computer was tricked into thinking that the netbios names for the machines were dns names.

Diggory Laycock · Sep 29, 2004, 04:41 PM

I'm not sure you need the .local. any more.

e.g.

Code:
Last login: Wed Sep 29 22:13:26 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Widebook:~ diggory$ ssh monkeyserver
Last login: Wed Sep 29 11:38:09 2004 from xxx.xxx.xxx
Welcome to Darwin!
MonkeyServer:~ diggory$

I'm not sure that the reverse dns lookup thing would work as you expect in your scenario. (but I could be wrong.)

waffffffle · Sep 30, 2004, 03:00 AM

I was about to respond that trying that doesn't work for me, but then I tried putting "local" in the search domains field of my Network settings and it actually works quite well. I'm going to look into figuring out how to broadcast rendezvous names for every machine on the network from my Mac, if that's possible.