Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
On Saturday 31 January 2004 1:09 pm, Ken Schneider wrote:
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.
I did understand that there's in general no connection at all between MAC addresses and hostnames. But there can be in particular cases, as the following test shows.
I found my outbound IP address by querying my router control program (there are other, simpler ways to do that, I suppose). Then, using your helpful hint, I did:
pwa@suillus:~> host 24.91.182.73 73.182.91.24.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer h002078d6b671.ne.client2.attbi.com.
And indeed:
-- my MAC address is 002078d6b671 -- pinging the attbi address above works
An interesting sidelight on all this is that my "secret" stable hostname (the one Comcast doesn't seem to want me to know about) is in an attbi domain, not a Comcast domain. So it may not last forever.
Maybe not, but it will last through dhcp IP changes.