ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon Jul 06, 2015 7:23 am #22562 Hi, I've searched all over including this forum but have no success in figuring out how to set a client name for an ESP8266. This seems to be the most elusive topic/question. So in hopes that someone knows how to do this I am going to ask here. Does anyone know how to set the client name on the device? I'd really like to do this and not have to go into my router and reserve the IP address and/or assign the client name after the fact in my router.
Thanks
David

- Mon Jul 06, 2015 8:51 am #22566 What do you mean by "Client Name" ?
Do you mean "Host name" ? There is no such thing on ESPs.
The only thing your router will receive from the ESP is its MAC address.

- Mon Jul 06, 2015 9:38 am #22575 Yes Host Name/Client name it's you say tomato I say tomoto
Just the mac address is not good enough especially if you want to deploy these in a real world environment. It would be to difficult, given the variety/brands of routers, to explain in detail how to set each ESP up to assign a static IP address and then if you had applications that would "Turn kitchen light on" would be much simpler with a client name.
thanks

- Mon Jul 06, 2015 10:09 am #22583 Howdy ... I think it would be valuable for you to study the Domain Name System (DNS) part of the Internet. At the device level, devices only know their IP addresses. The concept of a hostname is a "database" (not really ... but good enough analogy) that maps hostnames to their IP addresses. As such, any device connected to the Internet doesn't "publish" its hostname ... rather its only "address" is its IP address and the concept of the DNS name is a mapping from a textname to an IP address.

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