On Apr 10, 2025, David Wright wrote: > > > On Thu 03 Apr 2025 at 06:55:10 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote: > > Or you use mdns, which is the standard way of dealing with dynamic > > resources on an unmanaged network. > > The resources stay fixed during their lifetime, and any changes that > occur are at a glacial pace. The network is managed, by me. > > I also don't like the names that mDNS comes up with.
It should just be 'hostname.local'. But yeah, if the host defaults to a weirdo name (like my printer's default of BCP[SERIALNO]), they do tend to get a bit unwieldy. > > > (That doesn't mean you have to use > > mdns, it just means that if you instead decide to do something like > > copy hosts files around the network you're choosing to make up your > > own solution to the inherent problems that led to dns in the first > > place.) > > I can hardly take credit for inventing /etc/hosts. It's simple to set > up, and it causes no problems here. I don't think DNS was invented for > resolving two dozen non-hierachical names on one site. That's exactly what DNS was invented for. Manually managing host files is a pain after only a few hosts. Add one machine, and you have to update 5,10,20,[...] host files. Yes, "Domain Names" do include hierarchy (e.g. "company.tld"); but that's more an artifact that when RFC 1035 was written, we were already seeing convergence of names for common services (mail, telnet, ftp, etc.). > > For various reasons I'd much rather configure a static IP in this > > situation than set up a reservation on the dhcp server. Among other > > things, in a small network the bespoke dhcp configuration is likely > > going to cause pain that can't possibly outweigh the need to > > reconfigure a static IP if for some strange reason it needs to change. > > I don't know how to configure static IPs without a DHCP server when > there are devices that can only configure themselves by DHCP (or > maybe mDNS, I haven't tried). But what are the pain and the strange > reason? Correct -- if a device is stupidly-configured from the factory to REQUIRE DHCP, then you need to use DHCP. mDNS is just a simplified name resolution tool. It doesn't do host configuration for network/netmask/gateway. > > Mostly, > > to me, this falls into a weird place in wanting to use a complex > > solution (static dhcp reservations) without taking the relatively > > small additional step of just providing dns. Either go all the way > > and provide all the normal facilities (which these days are often > > baked into the router) instead of a mash-up, or go the easy route > > and use dynamic dhcp and mdns. > > Apart from configuring DNS, I don't want to have to run a dedicated > server 24/7. And none of the 24/7 routers has had DNS capability. > OTOH they've all had very simple interfaces for setting up static > DHCP reservations. Sounds like getting a better router would be a good idea (I mean, when the current one starts acting wonky). There are (or were) a handful of options that could manage to update the DNS resolver when new DHCP Hosts were added to the network (and, likewise, static entries for non-DHCP hosts). Granted, these days, they may need *wrt or tomato firmwares, because the good features always seem to be the ones that go away. :( -- |_|O|_| |_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert |O|O|O| PGP: DDAB 23FB 19FA 7D85 1CC1 E067 6D65 70E5 4CE7 2860
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