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    Assigning Multiple Mac addresses a single hostname/IP

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved DHCP and DNS
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    • C
      crymson
      last edited by

      After a lot of searching and reading on this forum and on google I am no closer to an answer about this:

      Here's my situation, I have an number of laptops that connect to my system via both wireless, and wired LAN connections, but the machines are never connected by both at the same time. Therefor, I'd like to be able to assign both macs the same IP/Hostname (or at least one of the above the same) so that services like git, smb, etc. continue to work no matter which interface I'm using.

      I've seen a couple of posts suggesting naming them machinex-1, machinex-2 or the like, but that is clunky and not useful for services that expect an exact name or ip (like Windows network lookup or git push). And while I have this working, it would be nice to give them the same IP address. I seem to remember on a linux router that i ran for a while that dnsmaq could be setup to do just this, and if I read the docs right pfsense uses dnsmasq, but that might just be my memory playing tricks on me.

      Is it possible, or will I need to settle/look into using a different dhcp server with my pfsense box?

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      • S
        SeventhSon
        last edited by

        pfsense uses dnsmasq for DNS.

        But wouldn't you want to do this in DHCPd?

        The GUI checks if you're not entering existing MAC/IP/hostname though. You could try editing the XML or config file manually?

        Normally you wouldn't want to have the same IP on multiple MACs…

        I'm not in the position to check this right now, unfortunately.

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        • C
          crymson
          last edited by

          So, I thought I would get clever and try modifying the dhcp.conf file by hand, a little ssh and vi and I thought I was good to go. However, I couldn't find a daemon script to launch dhcpd, so I used the webgui, and that was a no go. Seems that pfSense dynamically configures this via it's config.xml file, as mentioned above. Which isn't a big deal either, a little more vi and I've got a modified config.xml back it up to my home folder, and everything seems in order.

          But, I can't get get it to load the conf without over writing my entries. apparently it does some sanity checking on the file, and I can't get away with it.

          Thanks.

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