Dual WAN load balancing + VMWare, DNS forwarder doesn't work

xiaoyu · Jan 28, 2011, 4:39 PM

Hello All,

I'm new to pfSense but it's great! Thank you for bring us such a good product.

I followed
http://bora.bilg.in/blog/04/multi-wan-load-balancing-under-windows-with-pfsense
and get everything work except DNS forwarder.

I found that it might not be the problem of DNS forwarder itself, cause I was unable to resolve any internet domains in pfSense's shell either.

# ping www.google.com
ping: cannot resolve www.google.com: Host name lookup failure

I added the IP of ftp.freebsd.org to /etc/hosts and managed to install nslookup. It doesn't work either for any DNS servers:

# nslookup
> server 8.8.8.8
Default server: 8.8.8.8
Address: 8.8.8.8#53
> www.google.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
> server 192.168.1.1
Default server: 192.168.1.1
Address: 192.168.1.1#53
> www.google.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
> server 192.168.3.1
Default server: 192.168.3.1
Address: 192.168.3.1#53
> www.google.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

However I was able to ping all of the above name servers:

# ping 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=97.520 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=50 time=89.450 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=50 time=161.937 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=50 time=88.708 ms
^C
--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 88.708/109.404/161.937/30.526 ms

I also tried to telnet 8.8.8.8 port 53 and it also worked:

# telnet 8.8.8.8 53
Trying 8.8.8.8...
Connected to 8.8.8.8.
Escape character is '^]'.
^]
telnet>

Here's my /etc/resolv.conf:

# cat /etc/resolv.conf
domain local
nameserver 218.2.135.1
nameserver 61.147.37.1
nameserver 192.168.1.1

I'm really confused. Why I can ping name servers but name resolution doesn't work?

I even also tried pfSense 2.0 Beta5 and it doesn't work either for me.

Can some one help me? Thanks a lot!

xiaoyu · Jan 29, 2011, 1:16 PM

To answer the questions myself:
http://superuser.com/questions/113393/why-cant-my-freebsd-6-1-vmware-player-client-under-win7-do-dns-in-bridged-mode

Upgrade Shrewsoft VPN to the newest version resolved the problem. Hope this helps someone else.