Hostname / DNS Names not showing

BlakeRichardson
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

Hostname / DNS Names not showing

Screen Shot 2018-03-19 at 11.44.44 AM.png

 

As the above image shows only some of my devices are showing a hostname/DNS name. The ones that are are setup in the DNS as they are NAS units which are used by a large number of staff.

 

Am I missing something? 

 

 

13 REPLIES 13
PhilipDAth
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

It will be interesting to get some feedback from @MerakiDave.  Normally the system sniffs DHCP, NetBIOS and Bonjour traffic for device names.  I don't believe it uses or sniffs DNS.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Monitoring_and_Reporting/Rename_a_Client_Hostname

I think it would make sense to also sniff DNS dynamic registration packets.

DNS would be a handy option as a lot of network gear is configured with static IP's and doesn't have a netbios or bonjour name. Although I am not sure why its not picking up the names of our NAS devices....

Is this on an MR network or MX? If MX, what do you have the traffic analysis setting set to under, network-wide> general traffic analysis?

 

Looks like you can also enable "hostname" analysis for MR only networks via the same route.

Eliot F | Simplifying IT with Cloud Solutions
Found this helpful? Give me some Kudos! (click on the little up-arrow below)

Its a MS and MX network, traffic analysis is set to detailed. 

Interesting, I'd be keen to hear what others have to say, I'm clueless.

Eliot F | Simplifying IT with Cloud Solutions
Found this helpful? Give me some Kudos! (click on the little up-arrow below)

Why sniff them? why cant we just add our internal DNS server and have the meraki do a revers IP lookup ?

what we do manually when trying to identify an IP good old "Ping -a <IP>"

PhilipDAth
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

What about when there is no internal DNS?  What about if it is a non-Windows environment?  What about devices that can't register in internal DNS (printers, cameras, scanners, etc)?

MRCUR
Kind of a big deal

Are you tracking clients by MAC or IP on the MX? 

 

My primary MX network is set to track by IP as there are L3 devices downstream and generally all I see are IP's in the client list. On my MR networks (which are downstream of the MX), these show hostnames properly. 

MRCUR | CMNO #12

Its set to use MAC as a lot of devices on our network use DHCP and I wasn't sure how well this would work with IP.

Meraki's guidance is to use MAC tracking if there is L2 connectivity between the clients and the MX, otherwise IP tracking should be used. It's not related to DHCP. I don't think this is related to your hostname issue, unless you do have L3 devices downstream from the MX and MAC tracking is not working properly because of this. 

MRCUR | CMNO #12

Hey folks, sorry late to the thread, @MRCUR is correct, that setting is really for when you have L2 versus L3 connectivity downstream.  That said I don't have an answer at the moment, have you bounced it off Support yet to take a look?

I'm late to this conversation, but over the summer I upgraded our 2008 R2 domain controllers to 2019.  Since then, in dashboard the detailed hostnames do not show up any longer.  All device hostnames showed up prior.  I have my network in dashboard configured to collected detailed info, but the hostname visibility option is no longer there as stated in some documentation...which I guess is dated at this point.  Is this an issue within dashboard or in the 2019 DC upgrade?

Get notified when there are additional replies to this discussion.