Time to update DNS servers?

rpeters83

Gawd
Joined
Jan 11, 2009
Messages
513
On my home network, I have two Windows 2003 R2 servers configured for my primary and secondary DNS, with the first handling DHCP and WINS. Is there any benefit to updating the OS to something newer for something as simple as DNS handling? Thanks.
 
It would be worth the time for the experience. Otherwise only you can judge how much of a security risk it is to you, but it is fairly out dated at this point.

It would probably be worth the effort to change it up to something that isn't quite a resource and power hungry. I run a pair of CentOS VM's with Unbound for DNS at home. Lots of people use a Raspberry Pi with PiHole for DNS.
 
I can see this for a lab, but this seems pretty overkill for a home network. If you're dead set on a home DNS server, just fire up a Ubuntu Server VM and run BIND.

https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/dns.html

I wouldn't say this is overkill for a home network. It provides more accurate geolocation answers as well as much faster response time in general.
If you don't want to do an Ubuntu VM, you can do something called a "PiHole" on a raspberry Pi.
 
I wouldn't say this is overkill for a home network. It provides more accurate geolocation answers as well as much faster response time in general.
If you don't want to do an Ubuntu VM, you can do something called a "PiHole" on a raspberry Pi.

You can also run Pihole as a VM. Thats how I run mine.
 
I wouldn't say this is overkill for a home network. It provides more accurate geolocation answers as well as much faster response time in general.
If you don't want to do an Ubuntu VM, you can do something called a "PiHole" on a raspberry Pi.

Two Windows Server 2003 boxes just for DHCP and DNS? I may have misunderstood, OP could be using those servers for something else - but I assumed that if OP was asking to simply update or use something else, they aren't being used for anything else that's not critical. If just used for DNS and DHCP, firing up two Windows Servers seems unnecessarily bloaty.

Could you explain how using a local DNS server would give you more accurate geolocation results? Seems like it would be the same since you would either use the root hints, or one of the same recursive services that everyone else uses at home (OpenDNS/Google).
 
As a networking guy, color me confused as to the benefits of a local DNS server on a home network.

My $.02? Ditch 'em. They don't provide 'much faster results' - all they do is cache DNS queries so repeated results are faster. Modern routers do the same thing, or pfSense if you want something more tinker-y. I would love an explanation on the 'more accurate geolocation' as well, because I fail to see how that's possible.
 
As a networking guy, color me confused as to the benefits of a local DNS server on a home network.

My $.02? Ditch 'em. They don't provide 'much faster results' - all they do is cache DNS queries so repeated results are faster. Modern routers do the same thing, or pfSense if you want something more tinker-y. I would love an explanation on the 'more accurate geolocation' as well, because I fail to see how that's possible.

Yea - agree 100% here. I can see the benefits of running an internal DNS server so it's easy to manage your home devices by hostname rather than IP addresses, etc... but I fail to see performance benefits when most home network equipment already provide DNS proxying. Google's DNS (8.8.8.8) already use anycast routing to find the nearest one, so using a local DNS server yields no performance benefits as far as I can see.
 
Two Windows Server 2003 boxes just for DHCP and DNS? I may have misunderstood, OP could be using those servers for something else - but I assumed that if OP was asking to simply update or use something else, they aren't being used for anything else that's not critical. If just used for DNS and DHCP, firing up two Windows Servers seems unnecessarily bloaty.

Could you explain how using a local DNS server would give you more accurate geolocation results? Seems like it would be the same since you would either use the root hints, or one of the same recursive services that everyone else uses at home (OpenDNS/Google).

Running windows is the choice of the beerholder. :-D Bind runs on everything and is 1/10th the size of msdns. Unbound is even smaller, but tends to be unixy.

A local recursive resolver uses root hints to find authoritative nameservers. The authoritative resolvers can do geolocation based on either the IP address of the resolver (in this case you can't get more accurate) or if you're using a recursive resolver that supports EDNS Client Subnet (google public [8.8.8.8] or opendns). Doing your own local recursion saves your DNS queries from being used as datamining for google or opendns.
 
Yea - agree 100% here. I can see the benefits of running an internal DNS server so it's easy to manage your home devices by hostname rather than IP addresses, etc... but I fail to see performance benefits when most home network equipment already provide DNS proxying. Google's DNS (8.8.8.8) already use anycast routing to find the nearest one, so using a local DNS server yields no performance benefits as far as I can see.

I run a pair of Bind servers, one as a forwarder to the other over an encrypted tunnel to an offsite location. I don't do it for performance benefits, I do it because my ISP is a butthead and DNS scrapes for marketing/tracking.
 
In this day and age, every ISP is trying to leverage dns data. It's becoming an attack vector of sorts...
 
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