Advices about custom dns in a home lan

[tweety]

Hello.

What I have now : an all-in-one isp modem-router, a windows 11 pc, a linux machine with proxmox and some vms.
And also other devices (printer, phone tablet, pc, ...)

The first thing I want to change, put the modem in bridge mode and add a better router like an asus bq16.

Now I want to use names for my devices and not ip addresses.

So I have a vm with bind9 and I configured a zone .local (ha.local, printer.local, pc1.local, ...)
And a forwarder to isp dns for all other names.

If I change my windows ipv4 and ipv6 dns settings, it is working fine. I can access ha.home and all external names.
If I want to put those dns settings in the dhcp server of the router, there is a first problem, it is possible for ipv4 but not for ipv6.

So my first question : is it possible on the asus bq16 ?

Second problem, if my vm is not up, I have not internet access on all my devices.

Looking on internet I saw a nice solution : adding a firewall between the modem and the router.
With sophos there is a request dns route functionality that tell if the name is *.local go to local dns otherwise to go isp dns.
But .... it is too much expensive.
Same kind of functionality with fortinet fortigate, but not sure it its present on the cheapest models.
Last solution, pfsense. But which harware ? Does a cheap Protectli Vault – 2 have network performance impact ?

Any ideas, suggestions, ....

Thanks.

 

[microchip]

I use dnsmasq on my Linux server and /etc/hosts file with domain names <-> IP address mappings for local resolution (I use .lan instead of .local as the latter is reserved for Multicast DNS like Avahi). dnsmasq forwards all requests to the upstream server which is configured on my router (I use NextDNS on router) and resolves local domains from /etc/hosts. To make all my devices prefer dnsmasq as DNS server, I added its listening IP to the DHCP server of the router to hand out DNS servers to clients when they request IPs from it. As a bonus, I also added my own time server as additional.

I only use IPv4 on my local network since it has a few benefits over IPv6 and the latters is really not needed in small or home networks. I can't help with the ASUS router but I'm unsure why you want local IPv6 resolution?

 

[tgl]

Same as @microchip : there's no need to run IPv6 DNS yourself. As for the reliability point, the standard solution is to have two DNS servers and never reboot both of them at the same time.

 

[Digilog]

Hello.

Any ideas, suggestions, ....

Thanks.

Well there are a few ways to implement a DNS sever, but the norm is to install it on something that runs all the time, like a NAS box or a switch or router. Before I switched my network to ipfire (which has a name server in it) I used a 5 port Ubiquity Edge Router and installed bind9 and dnsutils from its Debain package manager. I would recommend getting a raspberry pi 3 or above, and install bind9 + dnsutils on it and run that as your LAN DNS.

Btw, I like your choice of the Asus router. Which next year, I will be looking for a wifi to connect to my 10Gb network.