Hi,

I am trying to get a more secure network running at home. I want to set up a DHCP/DNS/Proxy/Router server on a spare machine at work.

Until then I thought I would set this configuration up on a virtual machine to aid my learning (using openSUSE 10.2 by the way)

I have created a virtual machine with 2 network cards. The first card eth0 connects to my home router (192.168.160.0/255.255.255.0) subnet. It obtains an IP address through DHCP.

The second card eth1 is set to a static IP of 192.168.0.1. It serves as the gateway for the other machines on the network.

The DHCP server is running fine. I have created a dhcp range on the 192.168.0.0 subnet and set Gateway and DNS server address to 192.168.0.1

I then added some routing/IP forwarding from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.160.1 (my internet router).

Testing on a Windows XP VM on the same virtual switch. Picked up an IP successfully on 192.168.0.0 network and was able to ping an internet address.

So the DHCP is working but I am having trouble with the DNS Server.

I have set up my Forwarder List to my ISP's DNS Servers (this is obviously working as I can ping an internet address from the xp machine).

I have created a master dns zone (bfnet). Zone transport is set to "any". I have added my nameserver to the NS records "bf001u.bfnet."

My problem is that the dns entries do not seem to register. By this I mean that I am unable to ping my dns server (bf001u) from the xp machine and am unable to ping the xp machine from the dns server. Pinging the IP addresses does get a reply. Also checked in /var/log/messages and it does show the XP machine host name on the DHCPREQUEST.

Can anyone tell me what is wrong in my setup. External DNS requests are working but internal ones are not.

Many thanks,

nslookup
dig
aliases
listening port
post config file

Thanks for the reply. nslookup and dig did not find my dns server. Lookings at resolv.conf and named.conf it does not look like I have made the necessary changes to assist in internal name resolution - at the moment it is only working as a caching service for external domains.
I have found a good article on the setup of an internal dns server so will give this a go tomorrow as will have the physical machine to play around with.

I still consider myself to be a linux newbie and the transition from Microsoft OS's to linux has been quite a challenge. Even though I have a sore head after today, when I do get it working it will be a rewarding experience and I will begin to reap the benefits.

Thanks,
Ben