How to use machine name of iOS devices on network?

Question

I have an iPhone 4 and a 3rd generation iPad. They connect to my local home network over WiFi but I cannot use their machines names. I have an app on both devices that exposes a web server, but I can only connect to them using their IP addresses and not their machine names.

If I try to ping their names from a Windows PC I get the following:

Ping request could not find host <iOS machine name>. Please check the name and try again.

How can I enable their machine names to be accessible via DNS on my home network?

Answer 1

I use a Time Capsule as my Wifi router, and all my devices are registered in the domain (e.g. "lan") once a device has a lease and each device receives the "lan" domain as the search domain as part of the DHCP config.

Pinging 192.168.0.xxx, iPhone4.lan, just iPhone gets me to my device.

If you can ping the devices by IP address and not by name, then the answer lies more in your home network than in the devices themselves, and how the DHCP server registers device names once a DHCP lease has been obtained.

If your Windows machine has a static IP address, then its quite possible all you need to do is add the Wifi Lan name into the DNS Search config on the Windows PC, but more information is needed on how you are configured.