My Own DNS

Home Network

I’ve been meaning to do this for ages now and today I found the time to do it right. I installed dnsmasq on a spare Raspberry Pi to do three things:

  1. Provide nice name resolution on my servers (i.e. *foo*.peterkuehne.com)
  2. Log all DNS queries (for stats, etc, not for actual monitoring)
  3. Cache DNS lookups and make browsing a few milliseconds faster

As far as I can see right now, this all works great. It took me a while to get the DNS IP set up properly on my Windows machine, but after some restarting, even that worked.

Already I’m seeing a bunch of requests from random places, like my NAS trying to find some NXDOMAIN for a service that Netgear seems to have shut down a while ago, but never removed the requests for. I can’t stop the requests, but I can at least reduce the outbound traffic to my upstream nameservers.