On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 09:32:37AM +0100, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 04/07/14 20:42, Chris Green wrote:
I know, I've been here before, but it's bitten me again. With most modern routers/switches not providing local DNS how is one supposed to find out who's who on a small LAN?
At home I run dnsmasq but that's overkill for where I am now with just three or four devices on the LAN:-
root@acer-aspire:~# arp-scan -l Interface: eth0, datalink type: EN10MB (Ethernet) Starting arp-scan 1.8.1 with 256 hosts (http://www.nta-monitor.com/tools/arp-scan/) 192.168.13.102 d0:ff:50:07:b7:96 (Unknown) 192.168.13.103 00:0c:43:4a:55:66 Ralink Technology, Corp. 192.168.13.100 00:21:04:f5:7c:a0 Gigaset Communications GmbH 192.168.13.254 10:fe:ed:50:8f:fa (Unknown)So, I know that 192.168.13.100 is the Gigaset DECT phone but for the other three I'm stuffed. Surely there's supposed to be a way to know how to talk to these things! (One's a Beaglebone Black, two are TP-Link routers)
It can take a while guessing which is which and trying to ssh to them.
It occurred to me after reading Laurie's post, are you certain that the router doesn't do dns locally. Even if it doesn't, I'm fairly sure most routers will be able to allocate specific IP addresses for a specific mac address. If you did this, you'd just have a number to remember for each important device e.g. with a base address of 192.168.13. you could have important ip addresses grouped together e.g. .1 Router 1 .2 Router 2 .3 Beaglebone and addresses you don't need to know (dect phone?) higher up .100 Dect phone
That "router doesn't do dns locally" is where I came in. Most routers of a few years ago *did* do local DNS but none seem to nowadays.
As you say most do allow one to assign fixed IPs to specific MAC addresses and that helps a bit, but as I said to Laurie it's *much* easier to type 'ssh bbb' than 'ssh 192.168.1.102'.
Yes, I could script the ssh connection but I use my laptop in several locations each of which has two or three things I want to connect to and hard-coding all that isn't ideal.