Q I've got a Samba web server on Fedora, which is fine for browsing and generally works OK, so I decided to try a Debian server as well. I set up a very simple Debian Stable system and Samba, and the storage share is working fine, but I can't browse to it. I can open the share by IP address, so it seems to be a NetBIOS problem. I don't understand this, because I've been going over and over the smb.conf and comparing the two. The only difference is that Debian is using domain authentication and I used SWAT on it instead of hand editing as I did with Fedora. Also on Fedora, I've noticed that I can't ping any Windows systems by hostname, although they can ping me by hostname. Both systems have nmbd and smbd running and both these machines have their hostnames set as well as other general networking settings (IP, gw, netmask, broadcast, etc).
A You can always add a Linux system to the hosts file on Windows, which can be found using the Search option. Here you can set specific hostnames for IP addresses on your network, which will work in the event of it becoming unreachable via NetBIOS. You can also add the following option to the global section of your smb.conf. Of course, this needs to be unique for each of the Samba servers.
netbios name = SambaServer