NETBIOS resolution not workin

[Jonathan_Wexler]

I am trying to set up Fedora 11 on a rebuilt machine, and add it to my LAN which has a bunch of Windows machines, and one older PC running Fedora 6. My issue is that I cannot get NetBios name resolution to work either (a) by the new machine or (b) of the new machine's name by existing machines (all of which otherwise do NetBios name resolution already).

Specifics

a) The new machine is named "franky".
b) I can ping franky by other machines by using franky's numeric IP. I cannot ping franky by its NetBios name.
c) using franky, I can ping other PCs by their numeric IPs, but not by their NetBios names
d) franky is running Samba, and - if I set up LMHOSTS of the other machines with the name/IP of franky, then the file sharing elements of samba work
e) the relevant lines of smb.conf are as follows:

Workgroup = 21Prince
Netbios name = Franky
WINS Support = Yes
DNS Proxy = No

f) These are the settinga work on other LINUX box - obviously the Netbios name is different.
g) my LAN does not have a domain controller, nor any WINS servers
h) SeLinux is set to "not enforcing"
i) I have confirmed that nmbd is running on 'franky'
j) I have confirmed that etc/services has the proper entries for protocols 137,138 and 139
k) I did MKDIR /var/run/samba (some post suggested this could be relevant)
l) firewall settings are edited to trust samba
m) networking is enabled and Firefox (and yum, for that matter) can get to the Internet and resolve Internet names, so I know the router which connects by LAN to my ISP (Comcast) is giving franky a good IPv4 address
n) on franky, I can ping localhost, 127.0.0.1, but not franky itself
o) the router log shows a blank area where I would expect the NETBIOS name for the unit
p) running system-config-networking shows that Network Manager has managed to fill in the "nameserver" value with 'hsd1.ma.comcast.net' - if Linux is using this for Netbios resolution, no wonder nothing works -
by the way, this value must be coming from the DNS servers from my ISP (Comcast); it is not available in the router, a web search indicates that ' "hsd1.ma.comcast.net" is a domain controlled by three nameservers at comcast.net. All of them are on different IP networks.' hsd1.ma.comcast.net cannot be resolved by DNS, Comcast must not have this name in their DNS servers
q) the "hsd1.ma.comcast.net" behavior is occurs whenever the connection is enable/reenabled, and occurs regardless of the Automatic or "Automatic (addresses only)" option is selected. I tried to do a manual static IP setting to bypass DHCP usage, but this had no effect that I saw.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks
Jonathan

[Jonathan_Wexler]

Played around this this a bit more, and remembered some old problems
that I had (and never solved) with NETBIOS on my LAN (some of which were
devilishly intermittent).

I turns out some machines on the LAN can ping "franky". I still cannot ping from franky to anywhere else, but I do not think I will ever need to.

Jonathan