I can't ping anything on my lan from my N810 using the hostname. Pinging by IP address works out fine. When I follow the instructions in this thread on SMB I get an error when I try to mount my folders, saying basically that it can't resolve the IP address from the UNC pathname. Anybody have any ideas?

Thanks.

Are you running your own DNS server? If not, are the servers you are trying to get to registered with your ISPs DNS? Unfortuantely most of the DNS troubleshooting apps (like dig and host) are missing. However, ping should resolve names, if your DNS is setup correctly. What does your /etc/resolv.conf look like.

Craig...

an easy way to fix this would be to edit your /etc/resolv.conf file:
replacing 192.168.0.1 with the address of your local DNS (typically your router).

i dont know why the nokia doesnt pick up DNS from dhcp, all my other devices do =\

huh, interesting. It's just a home network, I have some Vista machines on a wireless router, nothing fancy. I can resolve anything on the internet fine (ie. google.com), it's just resolving the local machine names that I'm having trouble with. If I try to ping a machine name, say:
ping COMPUTERNAME
ping: bad address 'COMPUTERNAME'

I tried editing the resolv.conf file, but it's still not working. Originally, the resolv.conf only listed the loopback address:
nameserver 127.0.0.7

but I've since changed it to my router's IP.

It's been a while since I've worked with a linux machine, but I'm pretty sure that I used to be able to ping windows machines using the computer name before....

huh, well, I stuck my computername in the hosts file, and that seemed to work. I can get my password protected SMB shares now. I'm still curious about the name resolution, though.
In a similar vein, is it ok to change the hostname of the NIT? It's Nokia-N810-51-3 which corresponds to the OS version, I guess. If I changed it, will it break anything?

there is a dnsmasq running on the n810. to be able to look up local network addresses, you need to use the full qualified domain name.
as in 'computername.domain.net'

that works for me, at last.

wins/netbios != DNS

You need to fill your dns server with the hostname of your machines and say to the dhcp client on your tablet to get nameserver information from dhcp daemon.

I'll add my experience here as it seems relevant. I have a WRT54GL running openwrt, acting as DNS server for my LAN. I've configured each machine with a static IP address through DHCP and I have my own internal top-level domain (.lan). Other linux machines on the network can ping each other by hostname inside the network, but my N800 running OS2008 (or OS2007) doesn't *unless* I ping by the fully qualified name (desktop.lan instead of just desktop). Might be do to not having "search lan" in resolv.conf . I didn't bother solving it since the "workaround" is 4 characters.

-John