static i.p when hot desking

[D-A]

Hi,

Our current office setup is like this : 

Hot desks with dual monitors and keyboard and mouse with docking station that connects with USB which supply's the displays, the usb's for peripherals and the Ethernet connection.

Our dev team sometimes run tests locally on their laptops and want to give access to this test to other users. On our old setup before hot desk we used desktop computers so I just set the i.p as static based on Mac Address and setup internal DNS to point to these static i.p's but with this new setup the laptops will always get a different i.p address as they may be sitting at a different desk and have a different mac address.

Is there anyway to set the static i.p based on something on the machine other than the mac address as that will change each time they sit at a different desk?

I have been going around in circles trying to find a solution, even thinking using a PowerShell script that dynamically adjusts the hosts file when they connect to the network but it seems like over engineering.

I'm sure I'm missing something fundamentally simple as I'm not a network engineer so thought i'd ask on here.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks

[JamesC_AB]

This sounds like trying to force technology to fix a process problem. I can't think of a Meraki or indeed a networking solution to this. If I was managing those hot desk desktops, I would hate to think what state they'd be in after a couple months of developers installing their own custom tools, development environments, libraries, languages, redistributable packages, drivers, etc., etc. In your situation, I'd push for centralised servers that the dev team can remotely login to from these desktops. Upfront cost may be more, but I would think that long term operational cost would be less. My 2¢

[D-A]

Hey James, thanks for your 2¢ that's what i need. Two brains are better than one.

The devs don't use desktops they use laptops that they have their own tools and dev environments installed on. The hot desks are just monitors, keyboard and mouse with a docking station they plug their laptops in to.

The issue is that I suspect the ethernet adapter which i think is in the docking station will have its own mac address so this wont be unique to the users. If They plugged their laptops directly in to an ethernet cable I could then just setup static i.p's based on their laptops ethernet mac address and point dns to them but they don't, they connect to the docking station via usb which gives them access to the internet. I think if two laptops plugged in to that same docking station at different time they would get the same mac address, which would be the mac address of the docking station but I could be wrong. Guess i'll need to test it.

You question has helped me think of other ideas so thanks 🙂