The new Hitron cable modem in the house cowardly refuses to let me cache mac and ip address pairs, which is really annoying because my ip addresses now change on me over a couple days. The old router (also a Hitron) allowed that, so putting it on a UPS was generally enough to let me have a static IP table, provided I didn’t have to reboot it.

Here’s a hack using nmap that I just cobbled together to fill in the /etc/hosts entries on the couple machines that I want to talk to each other (mac and Linux machines, so all are unix like).

my %hostnameByMacAddr = (
'B8:4E:3F:C4:04:02' => 'router',
'E4:5C:89:C2:0F:4B' => 'macbookw # wireless',
'10:C2:C6:A0:20:58' => 'nuc2w',
'10:C2:C6:CA:93:6A' => 'nuc1w',
'A8:AE:ED:EB:39:86' => 'nuc1',
'A8:AE:ED:7D:CE:5A' => 'nuc2',
'28:C9:86:46:A8:15' => 'macbookt # thunderbolt monitor connected',
'10:24:2B:A1:7B:F7' => 'brother # printer',
'BC:87:A3:34:1A:FF' => 'macbooke # ethernet cable connected',
);

open my $h, "sudo nmap -n -p 22 192.168.0.1/24 2>&1 | grep -e '192' -e '^MAC' |" or die;

my $ip;
while ( <$h> )
{  
   if ( /scan report for.*(192\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/ )
   {  
      $ip = $1 ;
   }

   if ( /MAC Address: (.*) / ) {
      my $mac = $1;

      if ( defined $hostnameByMacAddr{$mac} ) {
         print "$ip $hostnameByMacAddr{$mac} # $mac\n" ;
      }
      else {
         print "# $ip $mac # unknown\n" ;
      }
   }
}

close $h or die;

If anybody knows how to set up an actual DNS server for internal networks, I’d be interested to see what is involved, since it looked very hard when I googled it.