MacOS – How to resolve netbios names with osx

macosNetworkwindows

Hi I'm new to osx and trying to resolve the netbios name of a windows machine. When I try to ping it I get the error cannot resolve hostname. When I use the command smbutil lookup %hostname% it will resolve.

When I ping the ip directly it works fine and this was working on a previous mac which I had to return and replace with my new one. I am able to resolve it from another windows machine on my network.

Essentially I just want to be able to ping my windows machine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

As you mentioned, smbutil lookup will resolve the name to an IP address:

$ smbutil lookup qx-2000
Got response from 10.0.1.21
IP address of qx-2000: 10.0.1.21

We can extract the IP address from this output:

$ smbutil lookup qx-2000 2>&1 | tail -n 1 | cut -d : -f 2
 10.0.1.21

Then we can use that in our argument to ping:

$ ping $(smbutil lookup qx-2000 2>&1 | tail -n 1 | cut -d : -f 2)
PING 10.0.1.21 (10.0.1.21): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.1.21: icmp_seq=0 ttl=128 time=4.823 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.21: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=7.373 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.21: icmp_seq=2 ttl=128 time=4.820 ms
...
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