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I recently purchased the Orbi Pro SRX30 with two satellites for a home office. Everything is working great and it's an improvement over my previous Wifi router. One thing I miss is having the wireless router provide DNS resoution for my LAN devices. When I purchased the Orbi, I understood that it would provide DHCP for the LAN however I also thought the Orbi would include DNS resolution for the LAN. It would be great if Netgear could add DNS functionality to their Orbi routers.
I plan to use a couple PiHole servers (two in active/passive configuration) for DNS resolution. I am just curious how other users in the community provide DNS resolution for their LAN environment.
Re: DNS resolution for LAN devices (Orbi Pro SXR30)
This is correct. The Orbi DNS mechanism does not resolve internal names. This is one reason some users turn to a different DNS server, such as Pi-hole, which does have this feature. I tested Pi-hole and verified that indeed it can resolve internal names. In my own case, I did see much advantage and just use the actual IP address for the small number of servers on my LAN.
Netgear has a forum where customers suggest changes to products:
Re: DNS resolution for LAN devices (Orbi Pro SXR30)
There seems to be some confusion about DNS. Netgear routers, like early all residential products, include DNS capability. When devices on the LAN use DHCP to request address assignment, the Orbi returns:
their assigned IP address
the correct subnet mask (255.255.255.0)
the IP address of the Gateway leading off the subnet (which is the Orbi router LAN IP address)
the address of a DNS resolver (also the Orbi LAN IP address)
Unless the user deliberately sets static IP address for DNS servers in individual device configurations, all devices on the LAN resolve URLs into IP addresses by sending DNS queries to the Orbi router.
One of the configuration options in the router is whether to forward DNS queries that it cannot resolve to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) recommended DNS servers, or to use user defined DNS servers. (My Orbi is set to resolve DNS using CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 and Google DNS 8.8.8.8)
When the user decides to implement Pihole DNS servers, the LAN IP address of those Pihole servers is placed in the user defined fields in the router setup.
Re: DNS resolution for LAN devices (Orbi Pro SXR30)
Thank you for the response. I need to clarify my question. All devices on the LAN are able to resolve external URL's via the Orbi to my ISP's DNS servers.
On my internal LAN, I have two TrueNas NAS enclosures, wireless printers, several Linux servers, an AIX server, layer 2/layer 3 switches, a couple MacOS laptops and Windows laptops. All devices are set to use DHCP and in the Orbi setup, I have address reservations set for everything except the MacOS & Windows laptops because I need the IP's to not change on some of the devices.
For example, I can no longer access either NAS enclosures by hostname (i.e. NAS01 or NAS02), instead I have to use the IP. Performing an nslookup from Windows or dig from Linux also does not resolve the hostname to IP. As a temporary solution, I've had to make the necessary entries in the hosts files on all devices. It's not ideal especially if I add devices to my internal network which means I have to change the hosts files on all of the devices again. My old Wifi router was able to perform LAN DNS resolution without making entries in the hosts files of all devices.
Re: DNS resolution for LAN devices (Orbi Pro SXR30)
This is correct. The Orbi DNS mechanism does not resolve internal names. This is one reason some users turn to a different DNS server, such as Pi-hole, which does have this feature. I tested Pi-hole and verified that indeed it can resolve internal names. In my own case, I did see much advantage and just use the actual IP address for the small number of servers on my LAN.
Netgear has a forum where customers suggest changes to products:
