[TriLUG] OT: setting hostname on Nintendo DS box

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:

> My son with his Ninendo DS box, just discovered the home wifi network 
> ("Dad, what's a WEP key?"). He's had the unit for about 3yrs and he 
> kept telling me it could connect to the internet. Of course I didn't 
> believe him. I had no idea that the unit had a wifi card till tonight. 
> Within minutes he's playing a game with a guy in Mexico and another in 
> Japan. To say I'm surprised is putting it mildly.
>
> The box comes up in dhcp/DNS as "NintendoDS", which I assume is the 
> default machine name. Assuming a bunch of his friends come over, 
> they'll have a DNS name collision (which probably won't bother them or 
> the DNS, but I'd like to know whose unit I'm pinging if ever I need 
> to). How does he change the unit's name?
>
> When I set up wifi for an event where there were a bunch of people 
> with Palm computers, enough of them knew how to change the unit's 
> machine name that all eventually were unique. Thinking that this was 
> common knowledge, I didn't bother writing it down. Now with google I 
> can't find how to set the machine name for Palm computers or for a 
> NintendoDS. I can't find any useful entries for "NintendoDS" with 
> google, or "machine info" "set machinename/hostname NintendoDS". The 
> Nintendo search engine at nintendo.com gives no hits for 
> "machinename/hostname NintendoDS".
>
> Thanks Joe
>
Have you considered setting it with the DHCP response?  You could do it 
via his MAC address.  This doesn't help everyone else showing up with a 
Nintendo DS and hitting the network, though.  They also may be smart 
enough to avoid collisions, it's not unreasonable to do something like 
get an IP via DHCP, use mDNS to see who else is on the network, if 
there's a collision, release and renew with a different hostname, etc.  
There may even be an easier implementation I'm not thinking of for this 
same idea (can you do mdns before the dhcp request? probably but it's 
late and I have another project to finish :) ).

Best of luck,
Aaron S. Joyner