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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 variou...
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.
Good Morning, Michael,
Well, the first question is: could I have set up email among local hosts without having an external domain name and the maintenance that goes with that, or could I have had my local hosts use their /etc/hosts files.
If the answer is "no, you really need a local DNS service", as I think it is, then either the router provides the service using the table I already maintain, or I set up a (redundant) table on another system, install DNS server software on that system, and point my other local hosts to it for DNS service. Having the router provide the service avoids a whole bunch of extra work.
When I last replaced my router (an old Linksys) with the 6400, it did not occur to me how much work it would save me if the router provided local DNS service. I now know. My next router will.
I'm not willing to risk my wife's work, which relies on Internet access, experimenting with router software. So I'm not eager to install third-party firmware on an otherwise standard commercial router.
I'd consider an easily-removable add-in if there is such a thing. I'd welcome any suggestions you or others might have. I understand from Google searches that other router softwares have the option of installing dnsmasq, which is what I installed on a Pi for my network, and I'd be happy to install that on my 6400 if that were an option, but it seems not to be.
Yes, the 6400 is now 4-5 years old, I suspect, maybe more. I won't replace it because of this issue (though I'm sure annoyed!), but when the time comes, local DNS service will be a requirement for my next router.
David
