Hi,
concerning local DNS forwarder.
I am in an environment where I need to resolve public DNS names to local
IPs for specific hosts and additionally public DNS for the rest.
In Windows XP it was possible to just stop the DNS cache service and set
2 DNS servers and everything worked.
Newer versions of Windows starting with Windows 7 do only connect to the
second DNS if connecting (not querying) the first fails.
So if your first DNS is up but has no reply for your query, Windows will
just add that fqdn to the negative cache and no longer
query the DNS for a specific time or until you delete the cache with
ipconfig /flushdns.
All of the above can be fixed using a local DNS forwarder.
I use DeadWood on my machine for years now.
https://maradns.samiam.org/deadwood/doc/FAQ.html
I just point my DNS to 127.0.0.1 (which is the deadwood service) and
configure Deadwood a little bit. It basically let's me
exactly specify which hosts to resolve how and can have something
similiar to a HOSTS entry, too.
As Domi wrote I would encourage you to tryout a local DNS resolver, too.
Regards
Peter
On 10.11.2020 09:14, Tomcsanyi, Domonkos wrote:
Hello Yves,
I am by no means a person with authority to make such a decision, but your
usecase seems to be so specific I would not imagine it would make sense to blow
up the size and complexity of the Windows wg with a local DNS forwarder.
I think it is way better if people just install a local DNS resolver/forwarder
on their own. There a ton of choices available, from simply python scripts to
large scale servers. You could easily configure any of these to distinguish
which DNS server to ask based on the TLD portion of your local domain or
whatever other distinguisher you have.
Then the only thing you need to do is tell your system (either via wg or by
other means) to use the local resolver and the case is solved :).
Also I am pretty sure one of the main philosophies behind wg is to be the same
as much as possible on all platforms. Adding a DNS resolver would again mean a
lot of complications when compared to e.g. the Linux version, since most Linux
distributions already feature some kind of a local resolver by default.
Cheers,
Domi
09.11.2020 dátummal, 23:46 időpontban Yves Goergen <[email protected]>
írta:
Hello,
I've already used WireGuard to connect to private networks and it's
quite easy once you figure out how to set it up. (Most tutorials are
outdated and haven't been updated, new ones haven't been written.) One
thing that's really missing however is DNS support. All I can do now
is connect to IP addresses. Names are not resolvable on the other
side. If I add the "DNS" directive to my client configuration, it
replaces the local DNS resolver and *all* lookups go to that server
instead. This isn't working either because I'm on two local networks
and each has its own local DNS server that can only resolve its own
local names (and forward the rest to the internet).
Specifying both networks' DNS servers also fails because when
resolving a name, one of them is chosen at random (and the other one
isn't regarded) and then you won't be able to resolve some of the
names some of the time. This is also very frustrating. And it wouldn't
scale to multiple active tunnels.
The solution I've read about is to set up a local DNS forwarder that
can be configured so that it uses multiple servers and queries each of
them and returns only a positive response. This way it could query
both local LAN DNS servers and for local names, only one of them would
resolve the name. This is a bit complicated to do if you're not
permanently connected to a VPN, or if you move from one local DHCP
network to another (like with a laptop). And it requires additional
software, setup and configuration, and probably intensive maintenance
and care. All of this makes WireGuard a pretty ugly alternative to
OpenVPN where all of this already works. Despite all the disadvantages
of OpenVPN.
I'm asking if it's possible to integrate such a local DNS forwarder
into the Windows client application. I imagine it would start up
automatically once the first tunnel is activated. And it would replace
the local system's DNS server setting for as long as it's active (like
the tunnel-configured DNS server already does). And it would query the
original locally configured DNS server and all configured DNS servers
for the active tunnels. It would then be able to resolve local names
and tunnel-remote names without any additional work on the user end.
The user wouldn't have to perform many complex tasks upon activating
or deactivating a tunnel. This would make WireGuard be as simple and
productive as I believe it was intended to be (but isn't yet).
This probably stops working as soon as other VPN software is used in
parallel, but the current "DNS" setting has the same limitation, it's
better than nothing and most of the time, you only run a single VPN
software.
Please let me know what you think of it.
-Yves
