On 01/05/2014 13:00, Brett Parker wrote:
Erm, that's not true for any router that I've had in the last 10 years, nearly all of them run a caching local DNS server (at the minimum) and add records of the form machinename.lan to the DNS server. Nearly all of them run dnsmasq (or a varient) that does this.
That's exciting, how do I find out if my router's doing this and what the .lan bit is? No mention of that sort of thing in its Web UI. I can see it's picked up device names in the DHCP section and it has indeed set itself as the local DNS server.
Maybe one day they might even merge the DHCP and Wifi whitelist MAC address lists!
RE what Steve was saying about Windows, it seems certain DOS commands (e.g. ping) also use WINS/NETBIOS broadcasts to do IP lookups so anything that has Samba in it might appear resolvable from them.
Cheers Neil