Hi,
I like to keep track of what devices are connected to my IPv4 network.
The DHCP Server - Leases tab in WinBox is very useful for that.
Often I can identify device by its hostname. But sometimes its not possible or there even is no hostname. To solve this I write comment to each device for identification.
But currently I can only do it if I also set the lease IP as Static.
I am trying to find a way to also comment devices with dynamic IP.
The way i see it it would be basically binding comment to mac address of the device.
Or is there any other easy way to keep track of devices with dynamic IP on my network?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Converting all dynamic leases to static is one approach (either through a script or manually). But this might be undesirable, especially if you have a lot of transient devices (guests, randomized MACs etc). You could easily run out of IP addresses unless you clean up unneeded leases on a regular basis.
Here is another idea. You can use Kid Control for this. First, add a “kid” user with any name you want and set unrestricted access.
All devices will show up under Devices tab in IP - Kid Control. Now you can add custom names to some or all of them. Double-click an entry, click Copy, set the new name. If you have just one user, it will be pre-selected (it doesn’t matter for this scenario), otherwise select the one you created above. When you are done making changes, this new manual entry will replace the dynamic one.
This approach has several bonuses:
You get all names in the same column vs name + comment on the Leases tab.
You can see devices’ network activity (download/upload).
It shows all devices with network activity, even the ones without a DHCP lease (which wouldn’t show up there at all).
Note, it “remembers” every MAC on the network routing traffic through the router, even if a device is long gone. Router reboot clears all dynamic entries, they can also be removed manually. The removed entries, I think, won’t show up until a reboot.
You can also convert a DHCP lease to a static one but then change the address item of the static lease to a name of a pool. That way, the lease will never disappear, but the address will still be dynamic.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Kid-control seems interesting. Unfortunately i found some things that could be better.
I have wifi extender and Kid-control puts all devices behind it as single device with single MAC and multiple IPs. Meanwhile Leases separate them (its just missing Bridge Port for some reason).
Ability to find devices with non-DHCP static IP is great but it would need some filter or other way to tell me. Now I see many devices but I cant easily determine if they are DHCP or not.
IP Address field shouldnt mix IPv4 and IPv6.
Well, basically its tool with great potential but needs some more work.
Currently I see @sindy suggestion as most straightforward way to let me track DHCP devices while not waste static IPs.
It just means your extender presents all devices behind it with its own MAC address. The reason why DHCP server recognizes them separately is because the client hardware address (MAC) is sent inside DHCP packet (it’s part of the protocol), so the server looks at that and not at Ethernet headers of the frame that delivered that packet.
Kid Control works at L2 (MAC addresses) to identify devices. That’s also why it combines IPv6 if it’s coming from the same network card. I would say Kid Control is designed like this intentionally since the goal is to set limits for a device (a “kid”), regardless of whether it’s using IPv4 or IPv6. The extender is obviously circumventing this behaviour by hiding the real MAC, same as many other network devices could do.
Thanks for explanation.
Yeah, Kid Control purpose is to limit kids and not really track the network for unknown devices.
I just thought that by combining the info Mikrotik has from leases and other sources it could offer really powerful tracker and identifier of devices in network.
Well, at least for IPv4. In IPV6 it seems more difficult, even if there is Neighbor Discovery.