Windows Networking / Domains

[Cra1gst1]

I have Pfsense router and unraid server and 5 raspberry pi servers and few windows PCs

Issues :
On my main pc nothink shows up on network other than my own pc , no unraid or other windows pc's just other devices and media devices on my laptop tho it all shows up

What i wana do :
i love that Octopi uses http://octopi.local/ to show the site regardless of the ip how can i set Website on local host to use this like http://Blueiris.Local goes to my windows pc webpage for cctv

what should i read into Domain , Workgroups ? can i set in pfsense name.local ? also can i set port for local.home to go to ?

anyhelp would be great , i wana tidy my network up and not have to worry if ip changes (i do use static ip) just wana use names so easy to remember

thanks
 

 

[Fleetscut]

The things that show up under networks on windows explorer are other machines on your network that are running services that windows can recognize, like a samba or printer share. Usually the protocol will try to find out what machines are on its own but it cant always recognize systems, especially if it doesn't have a profile for it (IE it knows certain machines are printers based on the ports that are open and the services that respond to requests). If this is not working either the machines on your network are not supported or you have network discovery disabled on your windows machine.

 

If you want to run a webpage on your machine you will need to look at services for hosting web pages. IIS is pretty common on windows, Apache is common on linux. Pfsense does have its own web stack however you need to provide it with the code for the sites you want to run.

 

As for addressing your machine through a FQDN - Windows has a service that will try to gather the hostnames of other machines and then allow you to access them by thier hostname, though i find this doesnt really work. A more reliable method would be to add definitions into the hosts file on the machines. If you have lots of machines it might be best to use a DNS service. Since you are already running pfsense you just need to turn on the DNS service, make some definitions, and then tell all your machines to use pfsense as the primary DNS.