Selfhosted

The only one I set static is the servers and that's for port forwarding. So I set it to what it was using at the time. Unifi IDs the devices for me otherwise.

We all go down this hole at the start. The truth is, you should only reserve IPs if you actually need it to stay the same. You don't need to check IPs as often as you think, I promise. The only segmentation and planning you should do for a home network is for subnets/vlans; LAN, Guest, IOT, Server, etc.

Instead of managing the IP addresses, just manage hostnames. Make sure every device with a customizable hostname is easily identifiable. This will help you so much more in the long run.

TLDR; don’t reserve IP’s

We all did back in the 90’s. But this is kinda counter to the idea of dynamic leasing of IP addresses.
The only reason I see for reserving IP’s would be to do some based on cidr ranges (bad practice) or because you need some shitty software that only handle IP’s and not hostnames.

Just liberate yourself and get used to not having control over IP. It will prepare you for ipv6 where dynamic addresses are part of the spec.

Your local dns server should be set up to register devices on ip lease - something all dns servers I’ve worked with last 20 years can manage. With properly set ip search domains this means that you can reach your devices by hostname, or by fqdn if you’d want that.

Also note that .local is a special tld reserved for mdns/zeroconf. Do not set up your dns server to serve this. You’d be better off using something like .LAN - this means that mdns/zeroconf can co-exist nicely on your lan.

Regarding vlans: this is something completely different as this is level 2 in osi. Each vlan is like a separate network - there needs to be routing to reach one from the other. I would agree that vlans are nice when used properly - to section and separate devices. One vlan for IoT devices - to keep them out of your safe home network - is a fairly common thing. A separate vlan for servers, one for management perhaps, one for guest-network and one for your normal home devices.

I use 4 vlans at home each with a /16 network from the 10/8 range. And the only static (not reserved dhcp) that I use are for dns and gateway. At work I still set up some sites where infrastructure like switches/routers etc are on static - and take this into account when I set up the ip pool(s). I’m those cases I’ll exclude the top end of the network and put the rest in the pool. Some like to do the opposite end, and some don’t care and just use all as pool and count on arp/ping to avoid conflicting leases (bad practice).

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #71 for this sub, first seen 20th Aug 2023, 22:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]