Support for addn_hosts in dnsmasq on Orbi RBR50

Reposting this idea here, in case it helps someone out and Netgear doesn't implement support for this in the Orbi firmware itself.

In case anyone is interested in a bit of an extended hack, here's a script that you can use (using the expect utility in Linux) to log into the Orbi and configure dnsmasq programatically. This way when the Orbi reboots, you simply re-run the script.

It allows both usage of /tmp/dhcpd_hostlist which uses the name each client identifies with (which often can be unset) but it also allows you to put a hosts file on a FAT32 formatted USB stick and put that USB stick into the Orbi Router which on the RBR50 is accessible via /mnt/sda1

Script:

#!/usr/bin/expect

set addn_hosts "addn-hosts=/mnt/sda1/hosts\naddn-hosts=/tmp/dhcpd_hostlist\n"

set host "192.168.1.1"
set user "admin"
set password "********************"
set timeout 20

spawn telnet $host
expect "login:" 
send "$user\n"
expect "Password:"
send "$password\n"

send "grep -qF addn-hosts /etc/dnsmasq.conf || (echo \'$addn_hosts\' >> /etc/dnsmasq.conf && echo 'addn-hosts added')\n"
send "pidof dnsmasq\n"
send "kill \$(pidof dnsmasq)\n"
send "/usr/sbin/dnsmasq --except-interface=lo -r /tmp/resolv.conf\n"
send "pidof dnsmasq\n"

If you don't want to supply a separate hosts file (in the format of ip_addr hostname, with each mapping being a separate line), then you can just remove the addn_hosts=/mnt/sda1/hosts from the addn_hosts variable in the script. This will make it so the only hosts file used is /tmp/dhcpd_hostlist

But if you format a USB drive as FAT32 (or vfat) and put a hosts file on it, you can then arbitrarily configure the Orbi DNS server with whatever local DNS names you want.

Hope this helps someone out.