Home network DNS DHCP with dual-wan FVS336G firewall
Hi, I have used Netgear firewalls for my home network for a decade or more. I love the devices. Currently I have about 10 devices (computers, ipads, iphones, smart tv) running on my home network. They all work fine to access sites outside of my network.
DHCP is enabled on the firewall, and it hands out local IP addresses (192.168.1.*) to my devices. The firewall uses the DNS from my upstream Internet provider. If I ping www.yahoo.com from my computers, I get a ping response just fine. So the local network devices can reach a DNS service.
My issue is that now I want to make some TCP connections among my local devices (some applications are listening on their local ports). I can connect the client and server apps on any localhost (because that doesn't need a DNS name lookup). BUT... when I try to get client on computer A to connect to a server on computer B, client A cannot reference computer B by hostname (or by FQDN, which I have no idea how to formulate inside the firewall).
My firewall login screen says 'netgear.com' as the domain name, but I don't know what that actually does. I was kind of hoping I could find a table inside the firewall to name my local conputers and devices so that the local devices could reference each other by hostname. But I couldn't find such a table.
My questions are:
(1) What's the "right" way to configure my home network so that my devices can reference each other by hostname (without manually adding a hosts file to each Windows or Mac computer)?
(2) Where can I find instructions on how to do that with a netgear firewall? (Who knows, maybe I'm completely on the wrong track with my current setup.)
(3) One day I would like to configure some port-forwarding so I can reach my home computers from outside the home network firewall. Maybe that goal influences the answer to (1).
Re: Home network DNS DHCP with dual-wan FVS336G firewall
Hi kkkwj,
Welcome to the community!
The domain name that you saw was actually for your firewall and it doesn't have to do anything with your DNS lookup. You may need to have a DNS server inside your network in order to translate those IP addresses to resolve its name. For setting up port-forwarding, here is the link.
Re: Home network DNS DHCP with dual-wan FVS336G firewall
Thank you for your reply. I had more or less come to the same conclusion about having a DNS server inside my firewall--who (or what) else could my machines query, if not a DNS accessible to them. Either that, or put a hosts file with the appropriate entries in each of my (few) computers.
I have forgotten so much about running a network over 20 years that it scares me.
