HOWTO: Resolve Netbios hostname system-wide

[Praetor77]

Hi!

Thanks for this guide, but I followed your instructions, as well as some other suggestions I found elsewhere such as installing smbnetfs,opening ports 137-139 and 445 on my firewall, adding: "name resolve order = host wins bcast lmhosts" and "WINS support = yes" to my smb.conf, and others, to absolutely NO avail.

Nothing worked. After HOURS of googling and reading through forums, I found a solution, and I am posting it here in case it can save somebody else from HOURS of work. Perhaps you could add it to your guide?

Adding nf_conntrack_netbios_ns to IPT_MODULES in /etc/default/ufw
solved my problem and I can now properly resolve netbios hostnames.

That is change:

# extra connection tracking modules to load
IPT_MODULES="nf_conntrack_ftp nf_nat_ftp nf_conntrack_irc nf_nat_irc"

to:

# extra connection tracking modules to load
IPT_MODULES="nf_conntrack_ftp nf_nat_ftp nf_conntrack_irc nf_nat_irc nf_conntrack_netbios_ns"

Thanks! Regards!

[MestreLion]

Adding nf_conntrack_netbios_ns to IPT_MODULES in /etc/default/ufw
solved my problem and I can now properly resolve netbios hostnames.

ufw is Ubuntu's firewall, which is not enabled by default, by the way. This has nothing to do with netbios name resolution. Disabling firewall would work too, or opening the required ports for NetBios protocol.

If you are behind a router (and who isn't these days?) you don't need a built-in firewall. Unless you don't trust your router and/or ythe other computers inside your own LAN. But, if so, you have way more problems than netbios resolution

[Champeau]

I just wanted to confirm what worked for me. I tried a whole slue of options. I followed many guides . . .

After a while I realized my problem was host name resolution. I could get everywhere with the correct IP address, but never with the host name. This only applied when I tried to connect to a Windows 7 network from my Ubuntu machine. To fix this I added all the relevant IP address to /etc/hosts with their corresponding host name. An example of how to do this was earlier in the thread.

The other issue I was having was that my two Ubuntu machines were able to see my Windows machines, but not the other way around (except for the Windows 7 virtual machine, but I am not counting that one). On my Windows machines I used the 'run' command and connected to my Ubuntu machines just fine by IP address. This was suggested on tomshardware I believe. In the run box, for example, one would connect by typing '//192.168.1.1' except you would put the IP you really want to connect to. I decided to quit at this point . . . I could at least connect to all the computers. Some day I will take another stab at it . . .