Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[rosede]

Can my DIR-655 serve as a DNS server as well?  I see an "Enable DNS Relay" and there  is the Dynamic DNS setting, but I don't see anything for it to resolve my internal equipment.

Thanks

Daryl

[FurryNutz]

Link>Welcome!

• What Hardware version is your router? Look at sticker under router.
• Link>What Firmware version is currently loaded? Found on the routers web page under status.
• What region are you located?

The router is mainly a relay or pass thru depending if you have DNS Relay enabled or not. When enabled, all devices get a 192.168.0.1 DNS address and the router handles and DNS requests from what it automatically detects. You can disable DNS relay and input custom DNS addresses:

• Turn off DNS Relay  under Setup/Networking. Link>Finding Faster DNS Addresses using Name Bench and input new DNS addresses under Setup/Internet/Manual.

Then all connected client devices will get DNS addresses that were specified under Setup/Internet/Manual.

[rosede]

FurryNutz,

My hardware version is A4 and the firmware version is 1.37NA.  I am in the central United States.

Yes, DNS relay is enabled.  I was experimenting with the setting today.  When enabled and I do ipconfig /all, I see that DNS is in fact my router. When I turn off DNS relay and do a ipconfig /all, DNS is then set to my ISP.  I turned DNS relay back on.

I have all of my equipment set to DHCP, so they get IP and DNS information from the router.  I reserved several of my machines so they are locked at the same IP address.  The names of my equipment shows up in the router, so I know that they are reporting correctly.  Since they names show up, and the IP addresses are locked down, I think that the router should resolve the names and/or IP addresses with I do an nslookup, but they don't. 

If I look up my primary machine name, I get a public IP address, not the internal 192.168.0.xxx.  If I do a reverse look up on the IP that I just got from the nslookup, I get a machine name for another country.  That isn't right. If I do an nslookup on my machine name, I should get the 192.168.0.xxx IP that is assigned to the server.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Daryl

[FurryNutz]

Internet Service Provider and Modem Configurations

• What ISP Service do you have? Cable or DSL?
• What ISP Modem Mfr. and model # do you have?

What are the results if you disable DNS Relay and test again?

Some info:
http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=56993.0

[rosede]

FurryNutz,

I have a cable ISP service.  My cable modem is a Motorola SB6120. 

If I disable DNS Relay and do an nslookup of my machine, I get back the DNS server of my ISP.  I get the server name as well as the IP address for that server.  I also get an error telling me that the DNS server cannot find my computer name.

If I re-enable DNS Relay, but don't put an internal domain name I get an error telling me that the server name is unknown, but it does show my router IP, 192.168.0.1.  Also, I get an and error telling me that the machine name is unknown and a non-existent domain.

If I set the internal domain name and enable the DNS relay, I get unknown server for the DNS server name and I get a public IP address that resolves to a company in the United Kingdom called Barefruit Ltd.  As I mentioned before, I reside in the central United States.  Also, I did a goolge search on the IP address that I get, and I recieved several hits from others who get the same IP.  However, those users complain about OpenDNS causing the issue.  Does this router use OpenDNS? 

I reviewed the link that you provided, but there really isn't much there that addresses my issue.  I disabled QoS as suggested, but all other settings were either already enabled, or disabled, depending on the suggestion.  I tried setting the workgroup on my machine to match the domain in the router, but I get the same responses as outlined above. 

The link that you provided was for a D-Link Wireless G, EBR-2310 router. There were some comments in that link about the price range of the router, and that it can't resolve machine names and IP addresses.  That the DNS software is very limited.  Could that be the case with my router? This router just isn't capable of resolving names and IP addresses?

Thanks

Daryl

[PacketTracer]

Hi,

I can only repeat what I said here, just replace EBR-2310 by DIR-655 and 'like most routers of this price category' by 'like most if not all D-Link routers'.

In general a router for SOHO like DIR-655 and many others are not designed to provide a DNS server function usable for internal name resolution. Instead they are only DNS forwarders doing no more than relaying any DNS request they receive from LAN to public DNS servers whose addresses are configured into the router either automatically during Internet connection setup (DNS servers of your ISP) or manually by you (if you want to use others).

In order to provide local name resolution for your LAN your router would have to define some local DNS domain (e.g. myhome.local, which doesn't exist in global DNS name space), deploy this domain as "DNS suffix" to the LAN clients, dynamically register the names and IP addresses of your LAN clients in a local zone file for DNS forward lookup inside 'myhome.local' (while relaying any DNS request outside this zone to the public DNS server) and maintain a reverse-lookup zone file (active for dynamic DNS registration either) for resolving local (private) IPv4 addresses to names.

There are boxes in the market that work this way (I have one and it is not a D-Link box), but I haven't seen it with D-Link SOHO routers so far.

But what do you need this feature for? If you have a LAN using Windows PCs only, they have their own methods to resolve computer names to IP addresses (but they are not available with NSLOOKUP) without the aid of your router.

PT

[rosede]

PacketTracer,

Thank you for the explanation. 

I have various machines on my network, not all are Windows machines.  I work in Unix/Linux and I have various personal Unix/Linux machines that I use as well. 

I am considering on standing up a DNS server to use here at home.  Possibly use a Raspberry Pi.  It would be perfect for this type of application.

Thank you.

Daryl

[PacketTracer]

Hi Daryl,

yes, setting up a local DNS server is one of the possible solutions. While those marvelous Pi-Boxes are always a good choice as a platform for providing any 24/7 service, another choice might be to use free ISC Bind running on one of your personal Linux/Unix/Windows machines, given the one you choose runs 24/7.

Or you simply use HOSTS files, one centrally managed file version distributued to all your personal machines (Linux/Unix: /etc/hosts; Windows: %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts), given that IP addresses of your personal machines never change, which can be guaranteed by either configuring them statically or using DHCP reservations.

PT

[FurryNutz]

Thank you PT for all the good additional information. I hope this helps rosede find a good solution.

Let us know how it goes rosede.

[rosede]

Hi Daryl,

yes, setting up a local DNS server is one of the possible solutions. While those marvelous Pi-Boxes are always a good choice as a platform for providing any 24/7 service, another choice might be to use free ISC Bind running on one of your personal Linux/Unix/Windows machines, given the one you choose runs 24/7.

Or you simply use HOSTS files, one centrally managed file version distributued to all your personal machines (Linux/Unix: /etc/hosts; Windows: %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts), given that IP addresses of your personal machines never change, which can be guaranteed by either configuring them statically or using DHCP reservations.

PT

PT, Yes, I know that I can use bind on a Unix or Linux server, and in a larger environment I would.  But in my environment, its overkill.  However, using hosts files are a pain the you know what.  If I make a change to something, I have to edit all of those files to reflect the change.

It funny how a little home network just suddenly starts growing.  You go from one or two machines, and then before you know it you have all of these devices that connect to your network, phones blu-ray players, game consoles, plus other server that I've been standing up, etc....  I look at my router and see the list of devices attached and I can't believe that I have that many devices using IP addresses.  I just assumed that the router would resolve names and addresses, especially the ones that I reserved, or ones that I have static. 

I think that I'll go the raspberry pi route.  Their small, cheap and very easy to work with, and I can have it stood up and running in just a couple of hours.

Thank you for your feedback and suggestions.

Daryl

[FurryNutz]

Good Luck. Hope it works out well for you. 

[rosede]

Hello everyone, I just thought that I would post an update.

I went ahead and stood up a Raspberry Pi for issuing my DNS and DHCP.  Whats nice about this is that its cheap, less that $50 for the hole kit, and easy to setup.

I did a little reach before hand to see if anyone had ever used a Pi as a DNS/DHCP server and sure enough, a person had. 

This link, http://www.andrewoberstar.com/blog/2012/12/30/raspberry-pi-as-server-dns-and-dhcp is a nice easy howto if anyone is interested in learning how.  He doesn't explain everything, there were a few items that I had to figure out, but for the most part its pretty easy.

I can now do nslookup's from all of my equipment and resolve my internal network, and that was what I wanted.   

Thanks.

Daryl

[FurryNutz]

Aweseome, thanks for sharing.

Enjoy.