Getting same IP Address, wired and wireless

Networking & Firewalls
1

In my homelab I am using pfsense’s DHCP service. I have used the “DHCP static mappings” for a number of items. My main workstation is my Windows laptop which can connect to the LAN by both wired and wireless connections.

I would like to be able to get the SAME IP address for the laptop whichever way it is connected (eg by either wired or wireless).

I certainly know how not to do this!! - I set up a pair of DHCP Static mappings for the wired and the wireless MAC addresses which pointed to the same IP Address. And it did not like that at all - it left the workstation not connecting properly. I had quite a job getting back into the pfsense console so I could put things back how they were (with the two Static mappings pointing to different IP Addresses).

Any way to get a consistent IP address?
Thanks.

2

What problem are you trying to solve? To me this seems to be an X Y problem.

Why do you need to have the same IP address on two different interfaces?

You can get consistent ip addresses, one for your wired and one for the wireless adapter.

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3

you can always set Static ip address on your Windows workstation, both for wifi and ethernet.

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4

I think this is the best solution as even with DHCP reservations you have to reserve by the MAC address of the Network card which would be different for the Wireless and Ethernet. Only issue with setting a static IP is if you connect to another network with the laptop you may not get connectivity and would have to turn it back to dhcp.

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5

Some laptops (mostly business devices though) have an option in the BIOS to use the same MAC address for Ethernet and WiFi. Alternatively, most OSs allow you to override / spoof the mac address on a per-adapter basis.

6

At least for Ubuntu and Windows I know that you can set IP configuration on a per-SSID basis. So to get around the issue you are describing, one could register the Ethernet adapter’s MAC address for a static DHCP lease and set the same IP address statically on only the one WiFi.

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7

Or viceversa since most external networks would be connected to via wifi.

8

You should really just set each interface to a separate IP address. You’ll only create more problems than you will solve attempting to use the same for both.

Also, welcome to the forums!

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9

Thanks for the various responses; as ever the more complicated bit is the context of my question. I wanted to have a small directory for ISO files which I could attach by a CIFS (or NFS) share to the hypervisor, and was trying to make that happen via regular workstation. Since then I have come to understand how to make the XCP-NG refresh (for instance) a mounted USB stick, and that has taken the issue away.

Is there a way I can tag this as “issue is solved” - that is a convention on some technical help forums.