NetVanta 1534 as a airborne standalone DHCP/DNS Server

[andyjo]

Hello,

I'm very new to administrating a network, and wanted to very my configuration with some people who know much more than i do!

So the back story... We have some planes with holes in them, and we collect a lot of imagery. We have a small server rack in each plane with anywhere between 4-11 systems. As also have a NetVanta 1534 to connect everything, and since it's on an airplane, we don't have access to the internet, or a router in the configuration, just a bunch of computers an a switch.

So far i've figured out how to configure DHCP, but i was hoping i could use our switch as a standalone DNS server as well, from poking around in the ADTRAN Web Setup it looks like i can do this... but i'm not sure it's done correctly.

In the System->Hostname/DNS i setup a domain name, and set the Primary DNS IP Address to 10.10.10.3

In my DHCP pool i setup the Primary DNS to the same, 10.10.10.3, with the same domain name.

When i connect to the server with one of our systems (just a windows box to test) it gets all the DHCP info, and i can ping around to other servers on the switch. I can even ping by hostnames, but i think it might be resolving hostnames by WINS, not true DNS, because when i try to do a nslookup of a host it times out.

Is there anything i'm missing? I've played with switch configuration a little bit in the past, but nothing this complex.

Thanks!

-Andy

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I ran  a similar configuration on my NV 1234.  Same results when it comes to NSLOOKUP.  I enabled DNS Proxy.  This can be done in global config via CLI by entering "ip domain-proxy", or by checking the "Enable DNS Proxy" check box in the Web GUI.

That allowed me to get responses via NSLOOKUP.

You can also run "debug IP DNS-PROXY" from the CLI on the switch to verify that your workstations are using your switch to resolve the names.

switch.bench#debug ip dns-proxy

switch.bench#con t

switch.bench(config)#ip host example 10.10.10.210

switch.bench(config)#

DEBUG RESULTS when using NSLOOKUP from a workstation:

03:53:42:295 DNS.PROXY Received request from 10.83.4.194

03:53:42:297 DNS.PROXY Serving reply for "example" from hosts database: 10.10.10.210

03:53:42:299 DNS.PROXY Received request from 10.83.4.194

03:53:42:300 DNS.PROXY Serving reply for "example" from hosts database: 10.10.10.210

[Anonymous]

@andyjo -

I went ahead and flagged the "Correct Answer" on this post to make it more visible and help other members of the community find solutions more easily. If you don't feel like the answer I marked was correct, feel free to come back to this post to unmark it and select another in its place with the applicable buttons.  If you have any additional information on this that others may benefit from, please come back to this post to provide an update.  If you still need assistance, we would be more than happy to continue working with you on this - just let us know in a reply.

Thanks,

Noor