wwklnd

Artist/designer (games AND graphic)

Agender cyborg commie who loves art and hacking and doesn't afraid of anything.


Kamratdataföreningen Konstellationen (left wing tech nonprofit I cofounded)
konstellationen.org/
Spejset (Swedish lefty Mastodon instance)
social.spejset.org/

A TP-Link Archer AX1500. It was on sale, seemed like a great deal for a WiFi 6 enabled router and a great upgrade from my old Zyxel NBG6602 which has served me well but only has a 100Mbit LAN port which means that, while all wired traffic on my local network is handled by my D-Link gigabit switch, wireless traffic is bottlenecked. It took me a while to set it up so that I got my public IP from my ISP, but it worked out in the end.

However.

On my old router, I was able to connect to hosts on my local network via hostnames: I could simply type ssh serverName and it would resolve to the correct local IP without manual intervention -- that zeroconf mDNS goodness. New router, much more advanced? Nope. Nix. Nada. Can't find any settings to help either. I contacted TP-Link support and they forwarded me to a couple of senior engineers who asked if I could manually add the hostnames to /etc/hosts which completely defeats the purpose.

I gotta say I was surprised that this was lacking in the new router. I'm waiting to hear back from the TP-Link engineers but I've done more digging and found people referring to this issue on the TP-Link community forums in 2020 and 2021 so I'm not holding out hope. Also, my old router runs a custom version of OpenWRT, which makes me wonder if this is just another case of FOSS kicking ass.


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