Sane dnsmasq setup

2013-12-16 by Quinlan Pfiffersoftwarehow-to

Dnsmasq is a slick little piece of software that acts as both a DHCP and DNS server. However, it’s annoying to setup if you don’t know what you’re going for.

My common use case is that I have an internal network behind dnsmasq and an external network of computers all using the same domain. Ideally, what I’d like to happen is that I can ping a computer and have it attempt to resolve first locally and then as a subdomain on the external network.

This isn’t as hard to do as it seems, and you can actually get it working under windows as well.

1. First of all you need to setup your domain. I’ll be using shithouse.tv because thats what I actually use. You’re going to need to subdivide your physical locations into domains, I use shithouse.tv.
2. Assign your domain to the network you want to use it.

    domain=apartment.shithouse.tv

1. If you’re using dnsmasq for DHCP, you’ll want to set that up too

    dhcp-range=10.1.10.100,10.1.10.200,255.255.255.0,12h

This will give 12 hour leases to people between 10.1.10.100-200. 1. If your dnsmasq server is not your router, you’ll want to tell computers getting your leases from you that you aren’t:

    dhcp-option=3,10.1.10.1

10.1.10.1 is my gateway. 1. Set expand-hosts (this sets the ‘search’ option in /etc/hosts):

    expand-hosts

1. Set some external DNS, unless you have your own (I use google’s):

    server=8.8.8.8
    server=8.8.4.4

1. Tell everyone this server is the best:

    dhcp-authoritative
1. Set domain-needed so that leasers know where they are:

domain-needed

For the full configuration file:

domain-needed domain=shithouse.com server=8.8.8.8 server=8.8.4.4 expand-hosts dhcp-range=10.1.10.100,10.1.10.200,255.255.255.0,12h dhcp-option=3,10.1.10.1 # Set the default gateway to the actual router, not us dhcp-authoritative cache-size=0

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Dropping this into /etc/dnsmasq.conf will allow me to ping external servers, and to resolve local computers. I can ping test.shithouse.tv, test.apartment.shithouse.tv and test and the all resolve to the same place.

I mostly figured this out while messing around, so optimizations welcome.