DNS server at home | Ysaak's space

At the beginning of the year, I finally received my first Raspberry Pi ! I have got a lot of ideas which can use it like a magic mirror. But for this first one, I will simply use it a my home server with a PiDrive storage extension.

Once I got Raspbian installed, I started to look into setting up the DNS server, the end goal is to have domain names for almost all devices on my internal network (e.g. instead of 192.168.1.14, I can use mydevice.home.lan).

DNS software

After some googling, I have found dnsmasq which is a lightweight alternative to bind. Here is a list of the functionalities is decided to use:

DNS for static IPs - Define domain names for devices with static IPs on your network
DNS forwarding and cache - Continue to use a default DNS server (in my case my ISP’s DNS server) and caching it’s response to increase performances

I could also use the DHCP feature of dnsmasq but I am satisfied by the one of my ISP router so I will continue to use it.

Picking an internal domain

The recommendation is to use a domain which I already own. But at the time I am writing this post I don’t own one. I have searched for a TLD not used by the ICANN (here is the list) and decided to use the .lan TLD.

The full domain of my home will now be home.lan.

Installation and configuration

Since Raspbian is a debian based OS, the installation is simple :

sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

For my setup, the configuration happens in the following files:

/etc/dnsmasq.conf - dnsmasq specific configuration
/etc/hosts - Hostnames for the static IPs

/etc/dnsmasq.conf

This configures how the DNS server should behave. I will only display the changes I have done in this file.

Speeding up DNS requests

# won't forward unqualified names (e.g. myserver)
domain-needed

# won't forward some non-routed addresses
bogus-priv

# won't forward requests for your intranet subdomain
local=/lan.mydomain.com/

Specify root domain of my intranet

# append the domain (below) to all hosts in the hosts file
expand-hosts

# appended to DHCP hosts and, if above option specified, to hosts from static IPs
domain=lan.mydomain.com

/etc/hosts

This file will contains the mapping between the static IPs and the domain name. I have extended the original file with the following lines :

192.168.0.1 router
192.168.0.100 printer
192.168.0.150 pi

Note: since I enabled the expand-hosts options I do not need to write the full domain name in the hosts file (e.g. router will become router.home.lan ).