Tag: DNS

DNS and DHCP for the homelab

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

Amazon Lightsail and DNS

So, Amazon Lightsail is a nice idea. You can host all kinds of things with it, pretty simply and pretty cheaply (oh, hi this website!) Something I found to be missing was the explanation of how to get DNS to work correctly. I wrote it off to updating my NS records after the initial response had been cached. So, waited patiently for 48 hours long hours. No joy.

Re-read the documentation. Yes, all happy that I’d followed that. Still nothing. Deleted the zone in Lightsail to re-create it. Still nothing. Well, this is frustrating!

What I found to be missing (and missing from the documentation) is that if you update your NS records in a Route 53 hosted domain, you have to also delete the hosted zone in Route 53. I only found this by chance when I noticed that the updated NS records I’d created didn’t match what I was seeing in the Route 53 control panel. How annoying! The Amazon documentation would work beautifully if you register your domain with another registrar, but falls short when using their own services. Continue reading Amazon Lightsail and DNS