[ale] How can I get hostnames on a very temporary LAN?

[ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com (Jim Lynch)]

For a special purpose I'm going to have a Netgear router not connected 
to the internet for local communications using DHCP.  I'll have a server 
connected via Ethernet and clients using mostly WIFI. I've seen times 
where in similar setups something assigns a host name to the server.  In 
those cases, I can connect to the server via a host name rather than an 
IP address.  I'd like to do that for this situation.  I can't seem to 
find the right words to get a search engine to tell me how.  I'm not 
running a DNS server.

I'm thinking the server might be advertising the name but I don't really 
know how it all happens.

Thanks,
Jim.