> When I bring my laptop to my friend's house and join his WLAN, why can't he ping it by name? Because DNS sucks. Why doesn't it show up by name in his router c

> When I bring my laptop to my friend's house and join his WLAN, why can't he ping it by name? Because DNS sucks. Why doesn't it show up by name in his router control panel so he knows which box is using his bandwidth? Because DNS sucks. Actually, strangely enough, both of these use cases work perfectly on my local network, and have worked both with my current router (running dd-wrt) and with my previous router (a standard AT&T combined DSL modem and router). DNS actually works extremely well with a few, by now ubiquitous, autoconfiguration tools.