Having trouble configuring custom dns entry
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Seems like this should be something fairly straight forward to do, but I can't figure it out after playing with the settings for an hour or so.
I have a local Plex Media Sever, what I want to do is make it so http://plexmediaserver/ goes directly to that server rather than having to use the ip address.
What I have tried was going in and on the DNS Forwarders service, I added a Host Override with the settings:
Host Name: plexmediaserver
Domain: plexmediaserver
IP: [my internal ip to the server]If I use the Ping tool in pfSense, it resolve and pings the correct internal IP. But any other computer connected to this pfSense box is not picking it up. I've tried flushing the DNS on those computers, have quadruple checked that their DNS servers are set to the pfSense box, yet still if I try to ping plexmediaserver from any other box all I get is could not find host.
I'm lost on what the problem could be here?? I thought the point of thise Host override section was for custom DNS entries, am I using it incorrectly? I've tried playing with the various settings under the DNS Forwarder and nothing seems to work (have made sure to flush DNS on other computers every time I changed a setting just to be sure).
Thanks for any advice!
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well for starters plexmediasesrver is not a fqdn (fully qualified domain name) it is just a host name. What domain are you using? As you have put it in the host override it would be a fqdn of
plexmediaserver.plexmediaserver
What does pfsense show for its domain. What domain do you have your clients in.. For example I use local.lan as my local domain for dns. So it would be plexmediaserver.local.lan for me.
If you want some client to resolve just plexmediaserver that would be a broadcast name.. But you should be able to make it work by putting it in pfsense host file with just that host name. But that is not really a good way to go about it.
Here is a thread that was pretty much the same issue https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=53203.0
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Yeah that is kind of what I figured it might be doing, but the interface would not let me leave the domain name blank like I wanted to do.
I don't want to have to reference this as a fully qualified domain name. I just want to be able to go to http://plexmediaserver/. I don't really have a good reason for wanting it that way, it's just my personal preference. I guess you can say it's what I'm used to from work as we have all the intranet stuff at work set without fqdn. =p I haven't talked to the networking guys at work to see how they configured it, but it's all Windows based stuff there so probably wouldn't help me anyway.
I tried doing as that other post suggests and using the local domain configured in pfsense. In my case I have that set to zombiedomain, so my pfsense box says at the top pfsense.zombiedomain. So I set the host as plexmediaserver and domain as zombiedomain and it still only resolves if I ping plexmediaserver.zombiedomain. My connection specific dns suffix on a windows box that I'm testing from reports as zombiedomain
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So .zombiedomain is not a good choice if you ask me that is single label.
So here I have a box called ubuntu, and my domain is local.lan - if I just put ubuntu into my browser you can see it does a full qualified query for ubuntu.local.lan and so dns responds with its IP and the browser goes there. You can see my windows machine uses local.lan as is search suffix which is why it does that query that way it auto adds the local.lan and works even when I just put hostname in browser.
To be honest this is really bad practice.. You should use a fqdn.
If you want netbios resolution then your client needs to send those out and your host need to respond to those or you need wins, etc. Understanding how name resolution works is the challenge here - using http://hostname/ is bad practice use http://hostname.domain.tld is how it should be done. Just set a bookmark and then your done ;) And don't have to worry about
