This is SO obvious once you grasp the idea – for some reason it missed me for the longest time. Let’s say you have a load of devices on your home control network… we’ll ignore Zigbee devices here as they don’t have IP addresses – as they work on a wireless network separate from your normal router network with (usually) just one Zigbee device contacting your IP network.
No, I’m talking here about normal devices with IP addresses and I’m SURE that well over half of my readers will be ahead of me here – but for those who aren’t… what happens when you want to access the devices by NAME on your network… for example I have a device I call SHP5-5G-REBOOT which will reboot my router at regular intervals. In case you don’t know it, if you give the device a fixed address (set within itself or using your router, putting it in an address rang outside of your DHCP range) you will in all likelyhood NOT be able to access it by name.
Some time ago I realised with the aid of a helpful AI, that there is rarely any need to have part of your address range outside of the dHCP range on your router. So for example – I now have DHCP set to cover 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.254 (in the router settings) (i.e. everything except the router itself) and have done MAC-IP reservations for devices I need to be at a fixed address – all while retaining the ability to access them by name. This simple action allowed me to access all devices by name while retaining fixed addresses as needed… BUT… I had one (above-mentioned) device which REFUSED to let me call it by name.
This morning, I realised that I’d actually fixed the address in the device itself – what’s referred to as a “static IP address”. I did that a long ago and forgot about it. Trying in the web browser to access it as SHP5-5G-REBOOT failed no matter what – though I could access it by IP address (192.168.1.10). Once I realised what I’d done, I made a note of it’s MAC address and added a reservation for it at that address in the router. I then removed the fixed address in the device and rebooted the device (I didn’t need to reboot the router).
Problem solved. Simple and obvious once you know – it’s a good idea to make a note somewhere of the mac-ip bindings you’ve made – just in case you have to change routers in future. Some routers will let you expotr that info in a handy form for later import.
I hope someone finds this useful.
Another good practice is, if your router supports it, to provide DNS entries for your devices so you can access them by names. That way if you do have to change the IP address at some point, you don’t have to go dig through every configuration that references the device. You just update the DNS entry at the router.