[Dnsmasq-discuss] Strategies for DNS and DHCP backup

Petr Mensik pemensik at redhat.com
Fri Apr 12 15:53:22 BST 2019


Never tried it myself, but if you synchronize configuration from primary
to secondary server, it might work somehow together.

Consider setting dhcp-authoritative on primary instance, but make sure
it is not there on secondary. You may want to use different dhcp-range,
so dynamically allocated hosts do not overlap.

Dns on secondary should use server=primary-ip as first server, other
servers configured after that. Use strict-order to be sure. dnsmasq
should be able to notice that server is down and use another address, so
hostnames should stay more or less synchronized.

I think proper configuration would require dhcpd from ISC, which has
some support for failover.

On 4/6/19 1:10 PM, john doe wrote:
> On 4/5/2019 10:54 PM, Chris Green wrote:
>> I run dnsmasq on a Raspberry Pi to provide DHCP and DNS services on my
>> home network.  I often spend quite long periods away from home and I'd
>> like to have a way of providing some sort of backup if the Raspberry
>> Pi dies for any reason.
>>
>> Recently the Pi has died a couple of times so I set up a second Pi
>> with the same dnsmasq configuration file but without it set to run
>> from /etc/init.d so that I could ssh into my network and start it
>> manually.  This worked OK when I had to use it recently but it does
>> require that I notice something is wrong which I may not do when I'm
>> away.
>>
>> Is there a straightforward way of having a secondary DHCP and DNS
>> server on a LAN?
>>
> 
> Thanks to Google:
> 
> https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/99xmei/two_piholes_with_dhcp_enabled_on_1_network_as/
> 
> https://github.com/jiasir/dnsmasq-ha
> 
> The above could help you getting up 'dhcp failover'.
> For DNS you would need to use zone transfer.
> 
> --
> John Doe
> 
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> 

-- 
Petr Menšík
Software Engineer
Red Hat, http://www.redhat.com/
email: pemensik at redhat.com  PGP: 65C6C973



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