MacOS – How to add smbutil as a lookup mechanism for hostnames

command linemacossmb

There are a bunch of computers on my network that are not on the DNS server. They broadcast their name using Samba or are Windows Workgroup machines.

When I run either ping or try to access them over the browser, it does not work.

However I am able to do a smbutil lookup thathost and get their ip address.

What should I do to get Mountain Lion to add smbutil as a mechanism to resolve hostnames when other mechanisms, i.e. DNS, Bonjour, /etc/hosts fail?

Best Answer

I like the mdns service discovery tool: dns-sd

So to check for SMB shares:

dns-sd -B _smb._tcp

You can then parse the instance names to get other details to look up like IP address and then check other services on that host with a tool like nmap

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