having trouble with local nslookup

[diyguy]

It seems as though my systems cannot resolve hostnames locally with nslookup. I am not sure what the problem is, dnsmasq is running, but i don't know what else to check. thoughts ? it does not work even from the router itself.

EDIT: I am on the latest beta release

 

[RMerlin]

Please provide more details: how are your DNS servers configured, are you using any third party DNS, what hostname are you trying to resolve, what is the actual nslookup error message, etc...

 

[diyguy]

Of course. Sorry, here are the details.

So the N66u is 192.168.1.1 and it is used as the gateway and DNS entries for all of my machines. The external DNS it is pointing to is 4.2.2.2 and 8.8.8.8

I have put "home.lan" on the domain name under DHCP settings.

I have a server called win2012 which has a static IP of 192.168.1.104

I also have a vm called vserver2012 with a static IP of 192.168.1.99

In addition I have various other clients which have static DHCP entries one called xp64 192.168.1.100

I can do an nslookup of xp64 from any of the machines or the router and I get the information back from the lookup. However if I try nslookup from the router to win2012 or vserver2012, it cannot find the information. additionally those machines cannot be found from any other machine with nslookup either.

Does this make sense ?

 

[RMerlin]

Static IP's hostnames can't be resolved because they do not exist in any DNS. This is normal.

In your case, my recommendation would be to use the router as the DNS server, and enter static entries in the DHCP reservation page, and have the servers obtain their IPs from the router's DHCP. dnsmasq on the router will be able to use the content from those reservations when doing any local resolution.

Another method is to manually add the static hostnames in the router's host file, which will be used by dnsmasq when doing local resolutions. That would allow you to keep the servers entirely static (rather than DHCP with static reservations).