making windows machine names resolvable in OS X

Hello,

On my home network I've two Windows machines and my macbook pro named freestyle, hackster and bluestreak respectively. I've Windows filesharing enabled on my mac. So when I type \\bluestreak on any of the Windows machines, I'm able to reach the file shares on my mac... so 'bluestreak' successfully resolves to my mac's IP address. However, I'm unable to reach my Windows machines from my mac using their names. To reach the fileshares on the Windows machines from my mac, I've to use their IP addresses. Is there a way to make OS X automatically resolve those Windows machine names to their IP addresses? .. I know I could edit my hosts file but then I'd need to assign static IP address to my Windows machines and I'd still need to use IP addresses if there are any temporary guest machines in the network. So what I really wanna do is just how it happens on windows .. name resolution of computer names to their IP addresses.

thanks,

regards,
Puneet

Macbook Pro (Early 2008), Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jul 7, 2009 7:25 PM

Reply
3 replies

Jul 8, 2009 5:54 PM in response to arorap

Really? OS X fully supports NETBIOS/WINS as a discovery protocol.

Do you have WINS configured in the network pane?

System Preferences / Network / Select the network interface you want to configure and select Advanced on the right hand side. Select the WINS tab.

Enter the NETBIOS NAME, select a workgroup from the drop down menu, and enter the IP address of the WINS server.

Let me know if this helps.

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making windows machine names resolvable in OS X

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