I have just purchased a new SuperMicro 5018A-FTN4 barebone, installed 16GB of DDR3 RAM and a 100GB Intel S3700 SSD to do some routing, DHCPing and DNSing on my home network. It's probably overkill, but I was a bit tired of having monitors all over the place, and this was the only board I could find that has IPMI.

I have freshly installed PfSense 2.3.1-RELEASE (amd64) from an ISO with a full Kernel, and aside from changing the LAN IP range to a class B range, I didn't really change much.

Unfortunately, the DNS doesn't seem to work:

$ nslookup pfsense.org
Server:		172.17.1.1
Address:	172.17.1.1#53

** server can't find pfsense.org.mynet.local: SERVFAIL

Dig isn't very helpful either:

$ dig pfsense.org

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> pfsense.org
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 57016
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;pfsense.org.			IN	A

;; Query time: 8 msec
;; SERVER: 172.17.1.1#53(172.17.1.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Jul 25 19:58:15 2016
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 29

However, it can resolve its own name:

$ dig pfsense

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> pfsense
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 33648
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;pfsense.			IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
pfsense.		3600	IN	A	172.17.1.1

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 172.17.1.1#53(172.17.1.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Jul 25 19:59:00 2016
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 41

$ nslookup pfsense
Server:		172.17.1.1
Address:	172.17.1.1#53

Name:	pfsense.mynet.local
Address: 172.17.1.1

I have configured Google's public DNSes 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 in the wizard and have left DNSSEC enabled, but switching it off doesn't make a difference. Naming my domain mynet.local may not have been a good idea, but changing that doen't make a difference either. I am a bit surprised though, that it is postfixing pfsense.org with .mynet.local