With the purchase of a new Wireless Access Point, there is not going to be a better time to setup a dot local domain in my home network / homelab. A side effect of this update is that I have separated all of my IOT (Internet of Things) devices and streaming network devices into their own private subnet. I have never been happy with my DNS naming convention to address and monitor these devices.
The first goal, is that I wanted to clean up the jamesrathbun.com domain. Externally, this domain is rather clean, however, internally it is another matter. My basic plan is of add every device which is not a server, router of printer into a .local domain. Additionally, I plan on labelling each device with a location or user subdomain to better identify a given device. My hope is that with a little bit of planning now, I will make it easy to manage the every growing list of IOT devices as they get added to our home.
Part of my network reclamation project, I spent some time identifying the every growing list of network enabled devices, and I must say, I am still a bit shocked. Now, my goal is to intelligently name these devices so that I may more easily identify an issue, or utilize some schema in a home assistant implementation.
My .local implementation scheme is as follows. Every device is going to be added into a family.local domain which is only accessible from our home. Each device will be addressed to either a room location or an individual family member. So, as an example, my cellphone would be cellphone.jim.family.local, while my computer would be laptop.jim.family.local. Sort of as an active directory feel to it. Likewise, a television would be labelled tv.office.family.local or tv.bedroom.family.local.
I am hopeful that organizing my IOT by device type and owner will facilitate longer term troubleshooting, make it easier to stay organize. My current thougts are the following subdomains:
- User
- Room
- Office
- Master
- LivingRoom
- Function
- Applicances
- Ring Devices
The overall goal is to better organize and keep organized all of the IOT devices which continue to infiltrate the house. Additionally, I have hopefull that this organization will pat dividends when I start playing around with and implementing a Home Assistant Server.