Unable to Complete Login Using Home Network-provided FQDN

Support and Troubleshooting
1

For several months I’ve been running Umbrel (currently 0.4.2) on my 8GB Raspberry Pi using a 2TB Crucial SSD. It’s worked flawlessly on my Gigabit Ethernet home network, connected directly to my network’s main switch.

The other day I decided to dedicate a static IPV4 address to my Umbrel on my PFSense router. Since my router also provides DNS service for my network, I added a hostname (umbrel – not terribly creative, I know) for it as well. Since my home network’s domain is homenet.xyz, this means that my Umbrel node should be accessible by referring to it as “umbrel.homenet.xyz”. I’ve done this exact same thing to everything on my network, and they all work, so I feel pretty confident that I didn’t fumble it.

The problem is, when I point my Browser (Chrome, latest version) at http://umbrel.homenet.xyz/ I can’t successfully log in. I get the login screen, and I can enter my password, but the login button only flashes, and I’m never redirected to the Umbrel Dashboard.

I can, however, ping umbrel.homenet.xyz. I can also use SSH to get into my node. Furthermore, if I point my browser at the static IP address I allocated for my Umbrel node (http://192.168.100.98), I can login successfully, and use every Umbrel feature without any problem.

Additionally, I can use the TOR browser and point it at my node’s .onion address and have no problems whatsoever.

What am I doing wrong? I mean, I could easily just bookmark the URL with my node’s IP address, but that offends my sensibilities.

Any suggestions/insights would be greatly appreciated.

2

Using just the IP is just fine.
Anyway if you really want to use that name umbrel.something, you should just add in your local hosts file the IP and name.
That’s it, your PC will not read any other DNS info and first will take that info.
Don’t bother too much. IP access on a local LAN is just fine.

1 Like
3

Thank you for the sanity check; I will do what you suggest.

However, I always like to learn things and so I would like to ask another question. What is happening (or not happening) that causes the login to fail when I use the FQDN, but the login succeeds when I use the IP address that the FQDN resolves to?

4

is simple: your PC DNS cache was purged in some way, so your PC doesn’t know anymore “where” is that umbrel.local.
Keep in mind that .local addresses are not FQDN, there’s not any NS that keep records of that.
,local mean LOCAL, means is NOT on internet and will never be. So don’t call a local address FQDN because is not.

1 Like
5

That makes sense–thanks for the explanation!

6

Thanks. Here I wrote a guide about the aspect of using static local IP for your Pi node

1 Like
7

Excellent–giving it a read right now!