How to determine the hostname from an IP address in a Windows network?

Question

My LAN has 50 Windows hosts. At the Windows command line I try ping to get the IP address of a running Windows machine.

The question is how to get hostname of a specific IP address in the same Windows workgroup?

Another question is how to know the hostname of Windows machine from a Linux box if I have an IP address? Which command do you use? I have one host running Kubuntu 9.04.

Answer 1

If you want to determine the name of a Windows machine without DNS, you should try Nbtstat. But that will only work on Windows:

For example,

NBTSTAT -A 10.10.10.10

On Linux, you should try nmblookup that does nearly the same:

nmblookup -A 10.10.10.10

Answer 2

The technically preferable method is to type nslookup <ip address>

NSLOOKUP actually asks the DNS server for the IP address of the hostname. Ping will use the local DNS Resolver Cache, which may be incorrect until you flush.

Answer 3

On Windows you can use ping -a x.x.x.x to attempt to resolve the hostname from the IP address.

Answer 4

There are a couple of ways of doing it on both Windows and Linux. For example,

1. nslookup: the classic way to find the IP address from a hostname or vice-versa.
2. ipconfig or ifconfig based on whether you are running on Windows or Unix
3. hostname -i on Linux

Ref: Multiple ways to get IP address from hostname in Linux and Windows

Answer 5

For mac users smbutil -v status -ae x.x.x.x works. You can also use arp -a to get mac addresses for everything on your network.

Answer 6

nmblookup might not work well for Linux hosts, because the NetBIOS name is deprecated. And on Windows, it is limited to the local network.