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

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.

Solution 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.

Solution 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.