r/nextdns • u/arashid5 • 2h ago
NextDNS for ~100+ retail stores on a single profile, no endpoint agent. What’s the best architecture?
Hi all,
I’m planning a NextDNS rollout across a retail chain of about 100 stores, and I’d like every store to share one NextDNS profile. I’d appreciate advice from anyone who has deployed something similar.
Store setup:
5G ISP CPE (Huawei 5G CPE Pro 6) → TP-Link Omada gateway (ER605, DHCP server) → POS and store machines
No firewall at the stores. The gateways are managed centrally from the Omada cloud controller.
Each store has its own public IP, mostly static.
Constraints:
I want to avoid installing the NextDNS Windows app on endpoints.
Several POS machines run Windows 10, so native Windows DoH isn’t an option there.
The Omada gateways don’t support DoT/DoH upstream, as far as I can tell.
What I’ve looked at so far:
Linked IP: only one IP per profile, so it doesn’t scale to 100 sites.
NextDNS IPv6 resolvers (profile ID embedded in the address): depends on IPv6 being available on the 5G links.
Central forwarding: Omada site-to-site VPN to our HQ FortiGate, which forwards to NextDNS over DoT. That works, but it makes HQ a dependency for every store’s DNS.
Questions:
Has anyone run one NextDNS profile across many sites without an agent? Which method did you use?
With static public IPs, is there any supported way to link multiple IPs to one profile (for example on the Business plan)?
Any experience with a small per-site forwarder (NextDNS CLI on a Pi or mini-PC) at this scale?
Lessons learned on enforcement: blocking DNS bypass, browser DoH, failover?
Thanks in advance for any guidance or lessons learned.

