DD-WRT DNSMasq Setup and Local DNS 

Having been round in circles a few time, I came across your tutorial and had my router running dnsmasq in minutes. Your instructions/suggestions were clear, concise and accurate. Thank you for your time in sharing this :)

Michael....great video.....all new DD-WRT users...and for that matter any new home router user will benefit greatly from this video

Thank you for the most informative video I have came across on explaining all the components behind the settings and not just "click here, click this, check that, your done". Excellent content and very educational. I hope I find more on your channel.

Thanks, it was so confusing, now it is clear that both gui and actual dnsmasq parameters were doing the same thing!

one of the BEST video on this topic

Thanks a lot! I just flashed DD-WRT onto my router, and your tip about the "LAN & WLAN" helped me get the local DNS working again.

Thanks! awesome video. Every aspect of it was perfect in my opinion. You help me out.

Thanks for creating this tutorial. got me going with testing my site on my local server with my iPad. :)

Thanks a bunch mate! I hope to cover all of those in more tutorials coming soon :D

amazing stuff. saved my ass at work bcs i had no clue how to do it ♥

Great Vid! Finally got it working.. Thanks!

@mwm The requirement for the / is due to the browser. Without it the browser he was using assumes he's typed something he wants to search for rather than a URL. If you disable searching from the address box or use a browser that doesn't support searching from the address box you won't need the /.

Hey thanks a lot for this.. liked the non-concise explanations. Had one question though. Why haven't you chosen to ENABLE LOCAL DNS in your DNSMasq options??

I do not have ENABLE LOCAL DNS enabled because it is actually not a DNSMasq option. It's only used by uDHCPd, not DNSMasq. So it really should not be placed in the DNSMasq options section. What makes it more frustrating is that that option box becomes disabled when you disable DNSMasq, which is the only time that you'd need to use it. Search on Google for the forum post which explains the whole thing by searching for the following: "Local DNS" option is for uDHCPd, not for DNSMasq

"So I am going to type in the IP-address that I would like it to resolve to, which would be 192.168.1.103 AND END THAT WITH A FORWARD SLASH." (9:40). It only took me a couple of hours to figure out that there shall be NO forward slash at the end of the IP-address.

Setting the "local=/lan/" key in the "Additional DNSMasq Options" is the same thing as setting "LAN Domain" to "lan." Most of the DHCP Server settings are directly mapped to DNSMasq commands, "LAN Domain" being one of them. The reason "expand-hosts" doesn't work without "local=/localdomain/" or "LAN Domain = localdomain" is because it has nothing (fully qualified domain name) to expand the host name too. Hence why "local=/localdomain/" or "LAN Domain = localdomain" does the trick.

All you have to do is add three entries in your "/etc/hosts" file on your dd-wrt machine, or in the "Additional DNSMasq Options" box, or dnsmasq.conf, or assign them as static leases in the "static leases" section (in all cases all three IP addresses should have the same hostname), and DNSMasq should handle the rest as it has a simple round-robin algorithm built-in.

Also people may want to add the no-negcache option to their "Additional DNSMasq Options" field, or their dnsmasq.conf file if they're encountering issues with DNS resolution. This will prevent DNSMasq from storing and remembering negative responses to DNS queries. A.K.A. when it cannot resolve a domain name...

great video! very helpful to understand DNSMasq. I did have a question regarding dynamically allocated IP addresses. Can I use DNSMasq to provide a name to a specific MAC address without providing a statically assigned IP address? I have a number of devices that I don't care what the IP is, I just want to reference the device by name. I assume some type of MAC to name mapping. thanks!

Excellent video - complete and very informative.Question: If I configure Google's public DNS servers on Basic Setup/Network Address Server Settings, will they override Comcast's DNS servers that are assigned via DHCP on the WAN side?

Excellent!!! Nice Tutorial!!! :)

I want only for my DNSMasq feature to do 2 things, first to buffer the DNS traffic to serve as a cache to improve performance and second to allow typing in names into the browser that are defined in the DHCP Static Definition tables: I have the setup exactly as you have specified with the following exceptions: DHCP Server: LAN Domain (blank) DNSMasq: Additional DNSMasq Options: cache-size=5000 no-negcache (tested with and without) expand-hosts (tested with and without) Now for none of the entries in the DHCP Server: Static Leases Table, none of the entries are resolved. I have entered several entries from this list into the browser, "hostname/" in both IE and Firefox and it doesn't resolve and I have tried ping hostname and it does not resolve. Is there some caveat to setting this up differently than you did, and as you say is an option by leaving the LAN Domain field blank?

Great video.

Thank you for this tutorial! Can you expand this method to change the port? For instance, if someone typed in mars/ it would take that implicit request for port 80 and actually return mars:3000?

Nice video!

Just a thought is there any reason why you shouldn't put 0.0.0.0 in Local Static DNS 1 or doesn't 0.0.0.0 count as static just a thought, great video very informative, thanks regards Adrian

I am not super clear on this one point. In a few different documents describing how to setup dnsmasq, I see some folks entering their external DNS in DNS 1, 2, and 3 but none use their router's IP in slot 1. And actually, when I do this on my DD-WRT v24 3.0, I get no DNS resolution, locally or externally. And on this version, so long as I enable dnsmasq in services, my PC's and mobile devices get 192.168.1.1 as the sole DNS server. If I disable, I get my OpenDNS servers 1 and 2 fed to the PC's and mobile devices directly. So yeah, can you clarify what I'm seeing on my end? And much of dnsmasq documentation focuses on local DNS resolution but I haven't been able to get a clear answer on this other issue as well. Does DNSmasq handle recursive requests to WAN as well?

still valid in 2019

You're very welcome!

I find that even if I don't put expand-hosts it will expand my one word names. BUT I DON'T WANT IT TO. WHat do I do to stop it expanding them?

Mike, How can we setup round-robin for 3 IPs and a name. Appreciate your work. Thanks

I couldn't get the setup so I just typed in the hostnames to access the particular server address..

so when in additional DNSMasq Options you type: address=/venus... you need to type machine address that running as DNS server? Could I use my router instead or I need to run dedicated server on my computer for that?

How do I make it resolve IP address from a different ip range like 192.168.0.x? I have a raspberry pi with dual wifi wlan0 witch has a ip of 192.168.1.106 connects to 192.168.1.1(main router to the internet) and wlan1 is running hostapd has a ip of 192.168.0.1 connects other devices to the 192.168.0.x. I want to be able to access 192.168.0.x devices on 192.168.1.x computer.

for a small setup wouldn't it be easier to just edit the hosts file in the router? or is there a real benefit on spending your resources on a dns server. Is it lightweight enough to not interfere with sqm or other cpu intensive qos?

using hostname/ doesn't work for me, does this video explain how to do something else other than that? can I use it with a external ip dns alas noip?

Thanks. I have one question. If you use OPEN VPN on your DD-wrt, will this setup still work? By the way, I have done this but I use Hidemy ASS Vpn and it does not work..

On my setup page the wins keeps on changing to google.( 8.8.8.8) I set the wins to 0.0.0.0 and just keeps changing back to google

My friend, first of all sorry for my english. I did almost everything you show. As I told my english is kinda bad and I made something wrong or I didnt understand well. It does not work for me at least. So I need to ask: Do I need to put my router Ip on DNS 1? In the setup page? I tried putting the command and after the I did putting the addresses in the box. Well it worked for me for a moment and so stopped. My webserver (miniweb) is running at port 8000, should I put this on IP? I wish it could work like yours.

1st, Thanks a lot. 2nd is there a way that enables me accessing the device without adding the "/" to the end of of the hostname ? Like in your example you always typed notionnetwork/ is there a way that allows us to type only notiongate (without the "/") ?

Thanks!

is there something that can be done to make the DNS name resolve to an Https: page or to port 443

My dd-wrt router doesn't resolve its name to ip no matter what!

Say I wanted to access a specific port on a device. Could I do address=/devicename.local/192.168.1.5:8080 ?

Can this be used to access local routes from the web? For example, if I forward mydevice.mydomain.com to the router's internet IP, can the router resolve/forward "mydevice" in this fashion? Thanks!

Notionwork How can you tell if dnsmasq is working properly and caching DNS records?

Check it out below!

Yeah, main question is the computer that connects to this router with dnsmasq running, what the fuck do you set the DNS IP as? The same as the router running DNSMasq? With DHCP addresses served by DNSmasp automatically set its own IP as the main DNS server to use in these leases, instead of the DNS servers you've listed on the router? I'm running a 10.x.x.x network with six DD-WRT routers configured as bridges, APs, etc... running DNSmasq... so I want to give everyone their own private DNS server at each AP point. I thought Local DNS setting was what did this, but apparently maybe not, it may only be some bullshit to redirect local lookups, and not a way to override what you want each AP to point to which DNSmasq server to use when it sends out DHCP leases (as some of my APs have more ram and processor power to spare than others for a DNS server function). radiolan.shellprompt.com choppergirl.air-war.org

Hi, did you get an answer for this?

Because RU-vid, in their infinite wisdom, disabled the ability to reply to old comments, I'll reply to xBeachPilotx's and mwm's comments in this comment. ***** I believe DNSMasq stores the cache on ram, and therefore I have no clue how to access that, nor view it in a readable form. I've done some searching around the net, and have yet to find a way to do this... Is that what you're inquiring about? @mwm I always have typed the / (forward slash) to access my local sites if they aren't a fully qualified domain name, to prevent my browser (Chrome) from thinking that it is a search I want to perform (for instance notiongate/ without the slash will result in a search on Google for notiongate). If you were to use the fully qualified domain name, like notiongate.notionwork.lan than you won't have to use a / (forward slash) at the end, as your browser will recognize it as a domain name, instead of thinking that it is a search... Hope that helps everyone!

Nope. Not yet..