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The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => D-Link Storage => DNS-323 => Topic started by: jc508 on August 06, 2011, 05:28:27 AM

Title: How to connect to DNS by name
Post by: jc508 on August 06, 2011, 05:28:27 AM
Hi,
I am having problems connecting to the DNS-323 by name.

All of the connecting computers are win-7.
The DNS is setup with static ip of 192.168.1.50 and its name  (on the setup device page) is dlinkjbs1

The router, a Netgear DG834 has it in its attached devices list with that name and ip.

when pinging from windows to the ip it works fine. when pinging to the name it gives ... could not find host DLINKJBS1. Please .....

The workgroup is the same on Win 7 and the DNS-323.

The real trick is it will come good - if I wait half a day to a day then something happens and it all works until I power the DNs down again.
why I care it that the backup software is all set to use the name\volume as it drive so when it cant find it by name all the backups fail.

If anybody knows how the names are assigned and managed I love to know.

Thanks
JC
Title: Re: How to connect to DNS by name
Post by: fordem on August 06, 2011, 06:50:14 AM
Make life easy for yourself and set your backups to use //ip_address/share.

The problem is caused by what is essentially an incompatability between linux (the OS on the DNS-323) and Windows and a very old Windows networking technology known as NetBEUI - Windows uses something called browselists to keep track of network shares, and the DNS-323 does not play very well with the technology.

There are several workarounds - one is to use a DNS server to translate the hostname to it's ip address, another is to use a host file on each Windows system - this is actually a "twist" on the DNS server work aorund mentioned above, but the easiest is to use the ip address as mentioned above.
Title: Re: How to connect to DNS by name
Post by: jc508 on August 06, 2011, 04:05:02 PM
Thanks - thats two solutions :)

Haven't used a hosts file for years and years.  Needless to say this morning its found the name anyway.

Thanks again
JC