Over in another forum, Hybrid8 had a great idea. I don't have the time to invest in creating this piece of software, but I'd like to see if anyone else wants to tackle it. For me, it would need to be a Windows implementation, I'm not sure whether Hybrid8 would need it under Windows or under Linux.

The idea:

Some of us plug our empegs into DHCP networks. In many cases, dynamic DNS is not supported. In fact, both of the networks I plug into are DHCP but without dynamic DNS. So my empeg does not resolve to a name.

Since the player's IP address changes on every boot, and we can't resolve it to a host name, we can't easily run certain third-party ethernet utilities. For example, if we want to connect to Mark Lord's HTTP interface with our web browser, we first need to run Emplode and transcribe the IP address shown in the discovery dialog box.

Bruno's simple idea was as follows:

For me, a simple solution would be a small app that would find out what the empeg's assigned IP is, and toss it into my HOSTS file along with an alias.

This can be done!

There's already some open-source code for discovering players on the network with a broadcast. It's part of the Emptool and Jemplode sources. You could run this broadcast without displaying a user interface, and simply grab the IP of the first player you found that matches your criteria (more below). Throw that into the hosts file with a predetermined name.

One thing, though: You would have to spec what the player's configured name was. Reason: There might be more than one player on the network. For instance, on my home network, Jemplode finds both the Jupiter and the Empeg, and you can never be sure which one shows up in the discovery dialog first. So I would have to be able to spec that this program only grabs the IP for a player named "Tony's Mark 2".

The other thing you'd have to spec to this program is what you want the player's ethernet hostname to be. For instance "empeg.mynetwork.com".

But those are the only two inputs the program would need, and then it could append/replace that data in the hosts file. By the way, it should handle a large hosts file... mine is huge because I'm doing the trick where you fill your hosts file with known ad-server names and resolve them to 127.0.0.1 (works great by the way).

Then I could put this program in my startup group or on my desktop, and after it runs, I should be able to connect to my empeg by name.

So, anyone want to tackle this?