local DNS for site to site VPN

[ColinTaylor]

That's good news (and a relief)! Was it tun11?

I can't think of a good way of both sides being part of the same domain without additional servers and running different DNS software. But the main problem is that the whole thing falls apart when the VPN link goes down, unless you cluster the DNS servers. That's probably too complex and expensive for a home setup.

Your idea of appending suffixes is probably the way to go. I remember we used to do that with Windows PC's on a corporate network. You can set the "Append these DNS suffixes" in the IPv4 Advanced IP Settings tab. This worked well because the PC's were locked down and the settings pushed out by a Group Policy. Off the top of my head I don't know whether the same can be achieved with dnsmasq on the router - Let me think about that one.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Sorry, I haven't been able to think of a better solution. DHCP can't push out a domain search order to Windows PC's.

If you don't have many PC's you could set the search order manually on each one. But if you ever changed a LAN domain name you'd have to remember to change all the PC's as well.

 

[simonbr]

Yes it was tun11 that fixed it.

I've been looking at this all night too, seeing if there was a way to push the dns suffix using dhcp-option 015, 135 and I think 119, but they are not picked up by Windows it seems.

Another option I was seeing, I'm starting to see the role of dnsmasq, it seems there is a way to add search domains on the server side (router) using dhclient.conf of resolve.conf, i'm still reading up and testing a few options. Do you have any on server side options?

 

[ColinTaylor]

Yes I thought about resolv.conf but it doesn't help. In the Unix world the "search" settings in resolv.conf would be the equiveilent of Windows' DNS Suffix Search List. But both are options used by DNS clients. So if you had multiple search domains in resolv.conf nslookups should work from the router's command line but that doesn't apply to clients on the LAN querying dnsmasq. dnsmasq doesn't normally process the search settings, and if you force it to it ignores all but the first domain.

dhclient.conf is not used by dnsmasq, only ISC DHCP Client.