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Recipe

Smart home setup walkthrough

A step-by-step recipe to lock down every device on your home network using Meridian's hardware fingerprinting and device trust engine.

What you'll need

  • Meridian agent installed on your primary machine
  • Admin access to your router's DHCP reservation table
  • A list of every device MAC address on your network

Step 1 — Inventory your devices

Run meridian scan --lan from your terminal. Meridian will enumerate every device on the local subnet and collect hardware fingerprints including MAC, DHCP hostname, and mDNS advertisements.

Step 2 — Assign static leases

Log into your router and reserve a static IP for each trusted device. This prevents rogue devices from obtaining leases and makes fingerprinting deterministic across reboots.

Step 3 — Enroll fingerprints

Pipe the scan output into Meridian's enrollment endpoint:meridian enroll --policy home --source scan-output.jsonEach device fingerprint is signed and stored in your trust store.

Step 4 — Enable continuous monitoring

Start the Meridian watchdog. It listens for ARP announcements and DHCP traffic, comparing every new device against your enrolled fingerprints. Unknown devices trigger an alert.

Pro tip: Pair this recipe with the guest network isolation recipe for defense-in-depth against IoT devices that phone home.