Chromebook Hostnames

[Vance]

We use about 4,000 Chromebooks in our environment and would like to be able to view these devices by their DHCP hostname instead of the random hostname that seems to be handed off to the dashboard (see snippet below). I'm guessing Meraki is picking this up somehow through Bonjour or NetBIOS instead, since there are only 3 methods that Meraki uses to pick up hostnames. Is there a way to configure a preference on Meraki to tell it to prefer DHCP hostnames over the other two?

Any recommendations for a workaround?

Our DHCP hostnames show up as the devices serial number (configured to do this through Google Admin Console).

[RSU21it]

Watching this with great interest as we have about 2500 Chromebooks.

[jdsilva]

This isn't the most ideal solution, but if you have an inventory of your chromebooks you can leverage then you can manually set the name for each device. This would be best done via the API and not in the web portal.

https://api.meraki.com/api_docs#provisions-a-client-with-a-name-and-policy

The biggest limitation here is that you would have to set this for each network the client visits

[BlakeRichardson]

@Vance  Google for what ever reason don't allow users to change the hostname of Chromebooks. Your options are do it manually or use the API as suggested

[PhilipDAth]

I can see these devices are connecting via WiFi.

If you use an user authenticated protocol like WPA2-Enterprise mode then you can add the "User" column to the dashboard.  Ths also lets you search on the logged in user.

Then you would just ignore the machine name.

For one client I used a captive portal splash page, and the users were made to log in via that.  This methods also causes the user column to populate.

If you do have the authenicated user name, and you really want to see the machine name match, you could then write a script to extra the username and change the machine name to it using the Dashboard API.

[Bossnine]

I've just assumed using the MAC is how I'll identify, regardless of what Google does or does not do with Chromebooks.

[BrechtSchamp]

This topic is similar: https://community.meraki.com/t5/Dashboard-Administration/Chromebook-DNS-names-in-dashboard/m-p/61008...

And @chuyendang shared a nice google sheets script in there. That may help. I haven't tested it though.