I’m sure this is something simple that I am overlooking.
So inside my (all RouterOS) network, I want to be able to communicate with my various devices using their hostname which I thought was their identity (i.e. [/system identity get name]).
What is needed for this to work? All of my devices point to an internel DNS server as their primary source for DNS resolution. There is a mix of DHCP and static addresses internally.
You need to statically define the hostnames in DNS for static devices, and your DHCP server must integrate with your DNS server if you want to dynamically insert hostnames based on leases. You can configure DHCP client in ROS to send hostname (DHCP Options) and if the DHCP server can push this into DNS, then this is what you should do.
If your DHCP server is Mikrotik, then you’ll have to use the “lease script” feature and perform DynDNS updates in the script.