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Forum Discussion
Is it possible for the R6400 to provide local DNS service (not forward requests; answer them)?
I finally realized today that I have lost days of work over the last 3-4 years maintaining tables and software for something that
my router should do: provide local DNS service. I see from various boards that other routers do so, so maybe I just didn't understand how to configure my R6400.
I've configured my R6400 to provide DHCP service, so it has the names and IP addresses of the various devices on my network (and MAC addresses, though irrelevant for this use).
I'd like for any DNS request FROM INSIDE MY NETWORK to be answered by the router from its tables, if possible, before forwarding to the external DNS servers. For example, a request for "pi-0" (no domain name) should resolve to the IP address the DHCP service has given the Pi without ever going outside the local net. Any request from outside should be ignored.
Have I missed something? Is there a way to use the DHCP table I already maintain as the basis for a local DNS service to supplement the external DNS service?
If not, I *think* I could provide my recently-created internal dnsmasq server address as the first DNS server, as a way to use an internal DNS server. But it's a redundant piece of work to set up and maintain that dnsmasq server, as it has been to maintain the /etc/hosts files on each of my systems over the last few years, too. And my router only offers two DNS server slots, so I can't have an external primary and external backup if I use a slot to designate an internal server first (if that would even work).
If I do enter my dnsmasq server IP as a DNS service in the router, should it be the first or second entry? That is, does the router try to resolve the name with first one server and then the other, or does it forward to the first server on the list and give up if the DNS server can't resolve the name?
8 Replies
I have the same issue. Every other router I've had for the last 10 years or so has had built-in local DNS functionality, but I can't find any way to enable this on the Orbi Pro. It even sets itself as the DNS server for DHCP clients and has UPnP, but doesn't seem to connect the two - the DNS seems to only be pass-through to a public server. :catfrustrated:
hdtodd wrote:
I finally realized today that I have lost days of work over the last 3-4 years maintaining tables and software for something that
my router should do: provide local DNS service.
Out of interest, what is the underlying problem you are trying to sort out?
Michael,
What focused my attention on the router not providing DNS service was a need to consolidate system management. I have multiple Raspberry Pis for various projects, and I wanted to email their daily maintenance reports to one local system rather than log into each of them. I don't want an external domain name, but I want the email "to" address to be as simple as "hdtodd@pi-0", from all my various systems.
So I installed postfix with minimal difficulty. But while I could email to another account on the same host, I couldn't email among hosts -- postfix couldn't resolve the names.
Now, I'd have thought that postfix would have at least used the local /etc/host file I had been maintaining (occasionally not in sync) on each of those systems, mastered from my Mac's /etc/hosts. But it didn't.
And then I thought: hey, the router has all those name-IP associations, since it hands out the IP addresses from the DHCP table I maintain on it.
So I did a little searching. And that's when I realized that the router doesn't provide local DNS service and that if it had, I wouldn't have been maintaining all those /etc/host files all these years. And I wouldn't have needed to set up a dnsmasq service on one of the Pis, and modify the /etc/resolvconf.con files on each of those Pis to point to it, and spend all that time figuring all that out.
If the router's DHCP page had a little checkbox that said "provide local DNS service for the hosts named in this table", I would have checked it at router install time and avoided a bunch of work along the way.
So, it's possible that I could have resolved this particular problem some other way, but the router could have made it easy for me if it had had this feature.
And maybe it does and I just don't know how to activate it. That's the question.
OK. I can see that you have a task that needs fixing. Whether or not the only solution is getting "the R6400 to provide local DNS service" is another matter.
It may be that someone has other suggestions on performing the task in hand. But be warned that the R6400 is a pretty basic, and now slightly aged, router.
Specialist operations like that might also benefit from one of the third party firmware installations out there.
As to the question from whitelynx , Orbi technology is not much like standard Nighthawk technology discussed in this section, and isn't something that the router hackers seem to have got into.
