So, on my home network, I have a bunch of PCs and a couple macs on both wired and wireless. I make it so that all of the desktop machines that have ethernet connections have a locally set IP (no DHCP reservations), and everyone on wireless hits my wireless router for a DHCP assigned IP.
I have my desktop (currently Ubuntu 9.04, but I sometimes boot to OS X on it) set up as a file server using Samba. It too has the IP set statically on the machine.
I can connect to it just fine using any method that uses an explicit connection to this server (for example, I can ssh into it with ssh [email protected]
). However, most of the time when I try to "browse" the network using either the Windows network browser or OS X's equivalent, my server rarely shows up.
My question is, how do these automatic network browsers figure out what is on the network and how can I get my server to show up? I know on Windows only networks you can have something called a WINS server, and I think that does what I am talking about, but what can you do assuming you can't use a WINS server.