Nebula Auto Naming Wired Clients

SkyGoat

I've noticed what I think is some new (useful) behaviour in Nebula in the last few months.

It used to be that when a Windows PC is connected via ethernet to a Nebula Switch, Nebula would just show the PC's MAC address as the client name.

Recently though I've seen Nebula is now detecting the OS as "Windows 7 or newer" and the Hostname of some Windows PCs and naming the client automatically on Nebula.

It's working on both Windows 10 and 11 computers.

I think the switch is intercepting the clients DHCP requests to get this information. Why? If I take one of the computers, change it to a static IP address, then rename the computer and restart, Nebula stays as the old name. If I change the computer back to DHCP mode, Nebula then auto updates to the new name after a few minutes.

But, Nebula isn't able to do this for every Windows device, for reasons I haven't yet been able to work out.

Is anyone else seeing this?

Zyxel_Melen

Hi @SkyGoat

Thanks for asking. We are clarifying this question and we will update you once we get further information.

GiuseppeR

Hi @SkyGoat

I see similar problems, it seems the way that Nebula follows to display also other (e.g. LLDP) infos.

As you can see here:

I have 2 NICs from the same server where with one of them I have:

• IP
• System name
• OS

While the other one seems to be a ghost.

In my case consider that both of those MACs have reserved IPs as you can see in my DHCP table:

If you use Advanced IP Scanner inside that network, for example, you can see all the IPs.