1

I’ve been tasked to deploy an IPAM solution in our environment and I’m currently looking at phpipam
I managed to deploy phpipam but it failed to pick up the hostnames of the computers within the subnet
I believe phpipam requires an internal DNS server to resolve the hostnames which we dont have at the moment
Our computers are Azure AD joined, we mainly use Google DNS for internet access, we use Fortigate as our firewall
My question is how do i setup a DNS server to achieve internal hostname resolution?
I want phpipam to be able to resolve the hostname of each computer in the subnet when it does a scan
My experience with DNS is very little so I’d really appreciate all the help that I can get
Thanks

3 Spice ups
2

All the while your devices use Google for DNS, this wont work, even if you had internal DNS, if your clients don’t talk to it, they wont register their hostname.

If you only need the hostname of the devices, you can get this from Azure under devices.

3

Ok old school, and will require manual management, but a quick and dirty solution is to add them them to your computer hosts file. Then you can just copy and paste that file onto all your computers. It will do what you want whilst you sort out a proper solution

3 Spice ups
4

There are options for internal DNS in Entra ID. Have a look at this link to Microsoft learn.

5

Do you have a DHCP server ? Most often DHCP servers or services would also have a DNS as the 2 features literally come together when there is DHCP ?

Then some IPAM and/or inventory solutions have a IP scanner that is able to scan machines, but the machines may need OS firewall rules to allow the ping & scan first.

1 Spice up
6

Since you don’t have legacy Active Directory, why are you looking to have IPAM or internal name resolution? I can get IP information of devices from both my AV console and my RMM console, as well as my DHCP servers (be that DHCP on Windows or DHCP on firewall). I would think that since you’re Azure ID joined only, the IP addresses of your devices would be less relevant.

7

To set up internal hostname resolution for phpIPAM:

  1. Set up an internal DNS server (e.g., Windows DNS, dnsmasq, or BIND).
  2. Configure DNS zones for your internal domain (e.g., company.local).
  3. Point phpIPAM to your internal DNS server for hostname resolution.
  4. Ensure Fortigate firewall allows DNS traffic (port 53).
  5. Test hostname resolution using nslookup or dig.

This will allow phpIPAM to resolve hostnames during subnet scans.