DNS records for CE Devices

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Guest

I am having Problems with a View Sonic V210. It has Ce 4.2 .Net on it. My
problem is that we have nearly 30 of them deployed across the network and no
way to remotely manage them. Have Solved that problem by finding some remote
management packages for Ce Devices. The Probelm is trying to get connected
to them. I have A network with 16 diferent sites. 10.xxx.200.xxx,
10.xxx.201.xxx and so on. I can connect to the CE devices by the Ip address
but I do not know all of the Ip address since most were handed out before I
started working. All Are set to dhcp as well. I have thought about bringing
all devices back in and setting static IP's and then adding entries to the
Host file so that I can connect via the host name rather than by IP but this
seems like alot of work. Plus we wat to deploy nearly another hundred
devices and that would just take alot of entries and managing of host files.
My thought is there has to be some way to get these CE devices to register
with my DNS Serer. I can see the record in DNS for the IP address of the CE
device but no host name is listed. I have checked that the machine does have
a Unique name. I can ping it by Ip but not By it's name. Makes connecting
to devices at other sites diffucult. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for you help in advance.
 
Unfortunately, there's no standard interface between DHCP and DNS, so it's
very difficult to do this sort of thing. You might have each device
register with a central server on boot and, if that was unsuccessful,
periodically thereafter. That central server would then answer requests
from your management control system for information on the list of active,
as far as it knows, devices, and their IPs. If SNMP is supported on the
devices, you could arrange for a given variable's value to be something that
identifies the device as one of *those* devices. A SNMP manager could then
be automated with a script or filter to show those devices which have that
variable value assigned to them.

Another possibility is to have each device, on startup, run a multicast
client program. That is, you'd write a program which opened a socket,
joined a given multicast group, and then sat quietly waiting for messages.
Your management program could then, when it wants a list of devices, open a
socket of its own, join the group, transmit a 'sound off' message and
collect the results.

None of these possibilities is as clean as having the DHCP and DNS servers
talk to each other, but it's about as good as it gets right now.

Paul T.
 
I'm not sure if this still stands, but in the old times (CE3.0 and before)
the recommended approach was to have a WINS server on the network where CE
devices are running. Take a look at the MSMQ administration documentation in
WM 2003 Pocket PC SDK
 
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