ER7206 DHCP issues with hostname assignment (hostname assigned a number that keeps incrementing)

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ER7206 DHCP issues with hostname assignment (hostname assigned a number that keeps incrementing)

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ER7206 DHCP issues with hostname assignment (hostname assigned a number that keeps incrementing)
ER7206 DHCP issues with hostname assignment (hostname assigned a number that keeps incrementing)
2022-04-30 18:55:38 - last edited 2022-05-06 10:07:41
Model: ER7206 (TL-ER7206)  
Hardware Version: V1
Firmware Version: 1.22

After my Unifi USG3P router bit the dust, I needed a quick replacement that offered similar capabilities so I went with the ER7206. It's been working pretty well thus far but I'm having one really annoying issue with its DHCP server. What I'm finding -- and this seems specific to Apple devices -- is that the device names are being changed to something like <devicename> (number), with the number ever incrementing.

 

It doesn't matter if I go back and manually change the hostname on the device, after a while the hostname will change. For instance, yesterday my iPhone was "iPhone (4)", now it's "iPhone (34)". My AppleTV devices keep incrementing their hostname. This is not a result of Apple's Wi-Fi MAC address rotation privacy features on iOS devices because I also see this on hardwired AppleTV and Mac computers as well -- the number at the end of the hostname just keeps incrementing over time. 

 

This was never a problem for me on other DHCP servers, and the DHCP settings available on the ER7206 console are very limited in what they offer. (And the frustrating omission of any sort of ssh access to the ER7206 make it so I can't tweak things further even if I want to.) Is this just a quirk of this hardware and I should set up a DHCP server on a different device -- or is something else going on? 

 

It's worth nothing that I'm using standalone mode as I don't want to have to set up a controller just for this one device -- but I'd happily set up a controller if this would give me tools to fix this problem.

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Re:ER7206 DHCP issues with hostname assignment (hostname assigned a number that keeps incrementing)-Solution
2022-05-01 04:20:22 - last edited 2022-05-06 10:07:41

Update: I may have been a bit hasty in blaming the ER7206 for this. I spent a bunch of time today messing with my network and switching all DHCP duties to another system to rule out the ER7206 -- and it came back again!

 

After digging further I think this is a problem with Bonjour on my network. It's a pretty well-complained about limitation here and elsewhere that this router doesn't allow for mDNS reflection across VLANs which seems like it should be table stakes for a device like this, so I had set up an Avahi-based mDNS reflection service on a different machine and I think this may have been the culprit. I did some reconfiguration on it in the hope that this will finally solve this really aggavating issue as I never ran into this with my Unifi router.

 

I saw elsehwere in the forums that native mDNS reflection capabilities should be coming to this device sometime in the near future -- it can't come soon enough. 

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Re:ER7206 DHCP issues with hostname assignment (hostname assigned a number that keeps incrementing)
2022-04-30 19:10:11
Just to note in the time it took me to write this post and now, my phone has gone from (34) to (89). This is pretty unacceptable and I'm hoping there's a simple solution here.
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Re:ER7206 DHCP issues with hostname assignment (hostname assigned a number that keeps incrementing)-Solution
2022-05-01 04:20:22 - last edited 2022-05-06 10:07:41

Update: I may have been a bit hasty in blaming the ER7206 for this. I spent a bunch of time today messing with my network and switching all DHCP duties to another system to rule out the ER7206 -- and it came back again!

 

After digging further I think this is a problem with Bonjour on my network. It's a pretty well-complained about limitation here and elsewhere that this router doesn't allow for mDNS reflection across VLANs which seems like it should be table stakes for a device like this, so I had set up an Avahi-based mDNS reflection service on a different machine and I think this may have been the culprit. I did some reconfiguration on it in the hope that this will finally solve this really aggavating issue as I never ran into this with my Unifi router.

 

I saw elsehwere in the forums that native mDNS reflection capabilities should be coming to this device sometime in the near future -- it can't come soon enough. 

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