On Mon, Feb 9, 2026 at 8:10 AM Chris Green <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a home LAN with a mix of Debian Linux machines, Raspberry Pis, > Beaglebone Blacks and Android running termux. > > All of the Pis and Beaglebones are headless so I use ssh a lot for > connecting to them. I use dnsmasq (on my main Asus router) to provide > IPV4 LAN DNS and DHCP. Thus all my Pis and so on have their names > available to me to connect to them, as do other devices like a printer > etc. > > If I moved wholly to IPV6 how could I provide the same sort of 'access > by name' for the LAN? The Asus router provides standard IPV6 services > already by giving all my systems with IPV6 addresses from the block > provided by my ISP, but I don't see how to get systems to have a name. > > I know I probably could put the names into the Asus router manually > (in the dnsmasq configuration there) but that seems rather clumsy > compared with everything working automatically as it does with IPV4.
In the network at my house, I use this topology: Internet <---> ISP Router <---> Firewall <---> My LAN The firewall is pfSense, and it isolates the untrusted Internet from my trusted LAN. pfSense also runs DNS and DHCP. DHCP clients automatically register their names in DNS. For the clients on my LAN, they use DNS as the source of truth. Name lookup always happens using DNS. They _do not_ use mDNS. In fact, I remove mDNS from the Linux clients. IPv4 versus IPv6 does not matter (with some hand waving). DNS will serve resource records for both of them for a query. If you are running IPv6 but not getting name resolution, be sure DHCPv6 is registering the hostname in the DNS database. That is a problem with pfSense when using Kea. pfSense users who relied upon DNS as the source of truth had to switch back to ISC DHCP due to [0]. [0] < https://forum.netgate.com/topic/184398/kea-dhcp-missing-register-dhcp-leases-in-dns-resolver > Jeff
