I keep threatening to set up a homelab. I want to keep it away from the devices that I already have on the network, and I want it to ‘just work’. That means I need a reliable DNS and DHCP setup.
Firstly I set up a new VLAN and allocated an IP address range to it. I’ve gone with VLAN 4 and 172.16.4.0/24. My Operating System of choice is FreeBSD with the latest supported release being 14.1, so I downloaded the 14.1 bootable ISO, mounted it in my virtual machine and began the install.
I didn’t do anything exciting during the install. Once the install had completed, I did a quick freebsd-update fetch followed by a freebsd-update install to get the system up to date, then it was time to go.
I looked in to what DHCP and DNS servers to install, and kept coming back to ISC BIND and ISC DHCP. They’re both tried and tested and simply work. I did look at PowerDNS, but I couldn’t get it to behave in the way I wanted.
Continue reading DNS and DHCP for the homelab