[Dnsmasq-discuss] upstream dns referral?

[bjh]

Hi,

I have a dnsmasq installation, running on a dedicated raspberry pi, 
that has served me well for almost exactly one year now, until midday 
yesterday when it apparently stopped referring queries to upstream DNS 
servers. I have been relying on this dnsmasq setup to do dhcp and dns 
for my home lan of about 20 clients since Oct 2018. As I said, it has 
worked flawlessly until yesterday. I have of course done restarts and 
power cycles to the pi and dnsmasq service but to no avail.

DHCP and local DNS queries still seem to work on this dnsmasq 
installation.

I haven't made any changes to my network or this pi lately, so I am 
rather mystified as to what has caused dnsmasq to behave differently all 
of a sudden. As a workaround, I have had to go to important client 
machines on my lan and set them up with OPENDNS DNS addresses so they 
can continue to function while I fix this.

As a complete dnsmasq newbie, I set the dnsmasq up in Oct 2018, with 
the help of an internet article that I can no longer find. It 
recommended leaving /etc/dnsmasq.conf alone and putting all site 
specific config data into /etc/dnsmasq.d/home.dns. This is what I did, 
see attached. File /etc/dnsmasq.conf remains unchanged from how the 
installer program left it, with most if not all features commented out.

The /etc/dnsmasq.d/home.dns file is pretty simple but it doesn't 
explicitly set up any referrals to upstream dns servers.

Quite frankly, I never really understood how dnsmasq knew where to send 
queries it couldn't resolve by itself. It was working, till now, though, 
so I went on to other things and forgot about it.

My question now is this:

What do I need to add to home.dns to explicitly tell dnsmasq the ip 
addresses of upstream DNS server(s) and authorize it to refer locally 
unresolvable queries to it/them?

Other thoughts or observations germane to this mystery would also be of 
interest.

Thanks,

Brian H.
Uxbridge Ont Canada
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