For me a comment it's useful whenever you can't uniquely identify an appliance on your network just from the hostname because it's either not sending the hostname (like recent IPhones) or because the name it's really not informative enough, so after I took the time to figure out what the appliance is and added a comment in the clients table, I'd like to see this comment everywhere the client is used.
I understand that looking up the client by IP address or by a subnet. I propose we first lookup the client table by IP, if we find a comment we use that.
I would suggest ignoring the subnet lookup for now and waiting to see if there's some demand for client comment lookup by subnet. This way we could use the comment as a friendly_name and clear up a lot of confusion around the field.
Now I'm sure I overlooked several things probably but, if that's not the case, what you think about the idea?
I have a few Local DNS entries for some clients so that they have "nice" names. And then I have 3 entries, including 2 of the custom ones, in Clients with comments next to them. The comments are multiple words with spaces between them.
For example a Synology NAS with no hostname of its own has the Local DNS "synology.lan" and it has a custom group in Clients with a name like "Back room Synology NAS". It already appears in Network and the Query Log as the Local DNS name. I wouldn't want the comment in Clients to appear anywhere else because a) it has spaces in and isn't a hostname, and b) it would be too noisy for my liking. I like a network-centric view of what's going on, and Local DNS can be used to target specific clients if desired.
Hey Chris, I appreciate that you may not want the functionality as described, but I'm still thinking what's the function of the comment if it doesn't show up anywhere, maybe it's just me but I saw several other topics related to improving the network view when the hostname is empty.
Maybe the suggestion was abusing the comment field, what I really would like to have is the ability to add a friendly name over appliances I have no control over, having said that it should be totally optional and opt-in.
Thank you for the local DNS trick, will try to do that and see if it improves the situation!
Understood, yes that's what I've used the Local DNS > DNS Records for. A small number of devices with unhelpful or no hostnames, so I put my own in there and can then resolve them by that name instead.