Host name resolution on a home network

Question

I have several machines (both virtual and physical) in my internal network at home. Currently I have to connect via 1P addresses. The one main machine I connect with to all the other machines is running Windows Vista. Is there a way I can have some sort of DNS capability inside my network as well so I can refer to these machines with a name? I think this would be a common problem in most households (running a few computers) and I think there might be some simple solutions out there. This would be something most routers should support out of the box - but why don't they? Can anyone recommend some of these or an easy way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

WINS/NetBIOS is the traditional distributed "workgroup DNS" for small private networks. It's why you can see other computers in the "Network" on Windows.

If you have static IPs and don't change around your VMs or computers, then just making a quick hosts file and distributing that is a quick, easy and once over fix. "Visiting laptops" won't resolve to that of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file

Afterthought: If these are Windows computers, then simply enabling Network browsing, and file and printer sharing should do the trick.

Answer 2

Many routers do support this. Try to use telnet (or maybe ssh, if it supports that) to connect to your router, and look for a dns menu.

Answer 3

Microsoft's LLMNR in Vista and Windows 7 is supposed to do this. Is it not working?

IETF Zeroconf (which is implemented by Apple as "Bonjour", and implemented by the Linux/FOSS community as "Avahi") also does this, via multicast DNS (mDNS). Installing Bonjour for Windows on all the relevant machines might give this to you.

Answer 4

DD-WRT might be the solution for this problem, from their About page:

DD-WRT is a third party developed firmware released under the terms of the GPL for many ieee802.11a/b/g/h/n wireless routers

It has a large set of features, including a small DNS server Dnsmask, which is bescribed as:

It is designed to provide DNS and, optionally, DHCP, to a small network. It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines with DHCP-allocated addresses to appear in the DNS with names configured either in each host or in a central configuration file.

Here is the tutorial from their website on how to do that: DNSMasq As DHCP Server