i install quite a few (debian linux) internet gateway boxes with samba installed so that the client can get their /var/www directory in network neighbourhood.
in order to diagnose network faults (i.e "WTF can't the stupid doze boxes see/login to/etc the samba share?"), i often need to find out the netbios name of a machine. for some reason this seems to an extraordinarily difficult thing to find out if you don't already known it... given that: a) i don't have a windows machine, b) i don't want no stinking GUI tool, c) i'm usually not on site (logged in with ssh), how can i find out the netbios name of a machine when i have it's IP address? can samba do it? smbclient doesn't want to do anything unless i already know the name. are there any other tools that can do it? nat (part of the smb-nat package) sometimes works, but only if nmbd isn't running...wierd. nat also tries to do too much...all i want is the netbios name, i don't want it to try it's lame cracking attempts. (at worst, i suppose i could hack the source of nat so that it just does what i want. nat10 is GPL code, based on samba.) any pointers to command line tools which would be useful to a unix geek would be very much appreciated. thanks, craig -- craig sanders
