Top posting a initial thoughts: 1) Can you flash your routers and install something like DDWRT that can run DNSMasq? 2) Get another router that does do DNS for the 3rd problem location (without any on-site processor) 3) Get a low cost low power device for the problem site. A Raspberry Pi perhaps? 4) Examine "Zero Config" networking, AVAHI on Linux. I don't know much about this. Will this work for you?
On 09/07/14 11:29, Chris Green wrote:
On Wed, Jul 09, 2014 at 10:14:02AM +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 8 July 2014 15:24, Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com wrote:
Ok, static IP by MAC address and custom entries in the hosts file sounds the way to go here...
You beat me to saying the same thing: surely a good old fashioned hosts file solves this?
Not really. My hosts file (on the laptop I carry from place to place) would have to have entries for all the devices at every location.
Yes it would. So?
This would mean that I'd have to firstly think of different names for the same router in different places
Names can easily be of the format Location Device or Device Loction e.g. HomeRouter, OfficeRouter, BoatRouter. Not a big problem I suspect.
(yes, I do have the same model of router in more than one place)
Well if it is the same, is there scope for, rather than having ranges, assign IP addresses on the router by mac address. Backup the configuration and restore it to the other routers.
and secondly I'd have to make sure that the DHCP server in each location used a different range of addresses to make sure that there are no clashes.
Yes you would. It'd take a couple of minutes.
<SNIP>
So either 1) Each router doles out IP addresses based on Mac addresses. Each router has a range of IP addresses that doesn't overlap with other locations. One hosts file on your laptop that lists all the IP addresses and friendly names for them. Zero cost. A bit tedious to set up, but shouldn't take too long or be too hard to maintain.
2) Run DNSMasq everywhere. Quite easy to set up, with possibly the cost of one processing device to run it on. Simple to maintain.
3) See if Avahi/Zero Config will do it for you
4) do 1) but without the hosts file. Maintain a manual list of IP addresses and refer to it.
5) Do nothing and put up with not knowing which IP address each device has, except by trail and error.
6) Run something like nmap or nbtscan or other tool listed here http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/saucy/man1/nbtscan.1.html to work out which IP address is which.
Good luck Steve