-----Original Message-----
From: "Paul W. Abrahams"
On Saturday 31 January 2004 12:24 pm, Ken Schneider wrote:
Hostnames are not associated with MAC addresses, they are associated with IP addresses.
I seem to recall that one of the predecessors of Comcast (Roadrunner? AT&T Broadband?) actually assigned real, honest-to-goodness hostnames to each customer that were derived from the MAC address. Maybe that's not the case any more. But James Knott wrote in a recent post:
Also, while my address may change, my host name won't, as it's based on my mac address. So any host name look up will return the correct ip.
That's what led me to ask the question.
And by the way, is there a utility that will take an IP address as input and return the corresponding hostname as output? If so, I might be able to use that to determine my MAC-based hostname.
Again hostnames are IP based -not- MAC based. What Comcast did was register your MAC address into there database to make sure only one PC was using the service. MAC addresses are only used at the hardware level IAANM. Use the host command to find the hostname associated with an address. This uses DNS so unless you set up your own DNS server it most likely will not help you. To learn more about IP addresses/hostname associations and about DNS I recommend a book ny O'Reilly and Assoc. called DNS and Bind. Ken