First, I’ll say that I’m really new to MikroTik and its products, but I’ve already fallen in love with the power they offer, especially at the price!
I have the basics taken care of, but now I’m trying to replicate an ability that I had with my previous router. It acted as a local DNS cache, and it provided IP resolution for devices on my LAN based on their DHCP Host Name. Depending on the OS, I could use either something like http://HostName/ or http://HostName.local to resolve the IP addresses for devices on my LAN. This made it so much easier to keep things like my local file servers accessible to less-technical people in my house.
I’ve tried to find any settings that I need to make this work, but thus far, I’m drawing a blank.
More or less you are looking at DNS server functionality. It’s called “resursive DNS server” and that’s what clients are using when they are getting resolutions from Mikrotik router.
I am not sure if this is possible with Mikrotik directly, but you can set static entries in ip>dhcp server>leases (so IPs won’t change), then add DNS records in ip>dns>static (resolve hostname to IP).
The first bit’s easy, here’s an example enabling local router to act as caching DNS server. In this example it’s using Open DNS to resolve external names ..
/ip dns
set allow-remote-requests=yes servers=208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220
To apply this to your clients, specify your local router address as DNS server in your DHCP network, where “local.lan” is your preferred local domain name ..
To allow resolution of DHCP assigned addresses, you need a script added to the DHCP server as suggested earlier. Start with one of the examples linked, but modify so the hosts are assigned using your default local domain name. But note that some devices don’t provide a particularly meaningful host name with their DHCP requests, and some don’t provide one at all.
Thanks for the assistance. The linked examples put me on the right track, and everything is working great now. Also, with one exception, the devices I care about do provide meaningful host names, so that one I’ve already dealt with manually.