I'm very new to linux -
I VPN into my MS server using Fedora laptop dell400

My network that I'm on is 192.168.0.222

The VPN server has an internal address 172.16.0.2

My VPN is successful I can ping 172.16.0.2 and even the router of the VPN server 172.16.0.1 and another computer 172.16.0.3 on that remote network (accorss the internet)

Anyway - so I'm setting up samba.
the VPN server is called BUCKY
the 172.16.0.3 is called BONUS
I cannot ping them by name

I have in smb.conf
wins server = 172.16.0.2

I had to change to interfaces = 172.16.0.0/24 because the dell400 got registered on the VPN/WINS server as 192.168.0.222
When I added interfaces = 172.16.0.0/24 it got registered correctly as 172.16.0.15 which is the PPP0 address on Dell400 (fedora)

I even added to the conf file the following:
name resolve order = wins

When I try to ping bucky I get:
[root@dell400 samba]# ping bucky
ping: unknown host bucky

It doesn't even wait to check with the wins server on 172.16.0.2. It immediatly tells me - host not found.....

Again - I can ping 172.16.0.2 which IS ----> Bucky

Any ideas?

Never used WINS support in SAMBA, but you need
wins support = no
in the config file to stop the linux box from trying to act as a wins server. I doubt that this is causing the issues but you never know...

There's a very brief overview here...
http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/net/netinfo/WINS/Samba.html

Cheers
ZB