[Dnsmasq-discuss] questions and ...

[Dirk Schenkewitz]

Hi All,

well, where to start? Short story: 2 days ago I discovered dnsmasq, installed the RPM for SuSE, discovered that it could not read the dhcp-lease file, compiled it from the sources, re-installed and - found it working like a charm! :)

Here is my first question: Is it somehow possible to tell from the executable binary which flags were set when it was compiled?
If not, I have an idea (or a feature request): 'dnsmasq --info' could tell about all the abilities that a certain dnsmasq binary has. How about that?

The longer story is:
We have a LAN with full IPv4 and IPv6 capabilities and a true IPv4/IPv6 connection to the internet. I was asked to set up a nameserver for internal use. I decided to try djbdns. After some fiddling it worked (without a dnscache) until I got the idea to add a caching nameserver. Somehow I didn't manage to get the whole thing to work, finally I ran out of patience, looked for something else and discovered dnsmasq.
Then comes the short story :) It's really a joy to see it: Questions via IPv4 or IPv6 about IPv4-addesses or IPv6 addresses just work, also everything in reverse, like snap. :-)
Furthermore it can read/use data from a DCHP-leases file, something that is a whole lot harder with djbdns (needs an external program and some patches).

But then I got the weird idea to use the ORSC root servers. I wrote the list of them into /etc/dnsmasq-resolv.conf, told dnsmasq to read that instead of /etc/resolv.conf - and got NXDOMAIN for www.google.com. Now I know the meaning of "...It is not capable of recursively answering arbitrary queries starting from the root servers...". :)

So here is my 2nd question: How can I use the ORSC root servers instead of the usual ones? Any idea what might be the easiest/cheapest way do that?

I had the idea to leave one instance of tinydns (of the djbdns-package of tools) running and have it listen & serve at the localhost address, but that does not work.
Anyway, I would rather get rid of djbdns completely, with all the combinations we have, maintaining it became sort of a PITA...


@ Simon Kelley: There are some links at your page about dnsmasq. The link to the german text is broken. I found these in german:
http://www.linuxnetmag.com/de/issue7/m7dnsmasq1.html

Cheers and Thanks for the cool program!
   Dirk