I’ve been finding that running DNS on my “NAS” isn’t the best of ideas and I’d like to have a “highly available” DNS system. Nothing’s quite worse than getting a call from the Mrs complaining that the internet isn’t working while you’re in the middle of a system update or because the cat stepped on a power switch. (Racking everything is another long term goal.)

I have been using Technitium’s DNS Server for my network. It feels light and snappy, lets me do unholy things with DNS, has really good filtering abilities. The problem I have with it though is there is no ability to configure one and it’s peers update from that too. There’s no replication going on (though according the github, it’s in the works).

Which is why I like ADDS DNS, records are replicated to all nodes and it just works(tm). So I light up some Server Cores and setup my own little forest.

The resulting DNS structure is very simple. On each of my Proxmox servers, I run a copy of Technitium and a ADDS/DNS server. The ADDS/DNS is pointed at each of the Technitium for forward lookups which in turn look to Quad9 and Google (I know I know, but they seem to run a pretty decent DNS resolver) for their own forward lookups.

Going forward, I’d like to get the DHCP integrated into the DNS servers so hostnames are updated. My network is fairly small so manually adding records for the important things isn’t too much of a hassle. If I had a Proxmox cluster and Ceph pool setup, I’d probably have forgone this, but I don’t have either….yet.

Post draft update

We lost power this last week and the main Proxmox server is out of action which means that I’ve lost half my DNS servers now. Except for the little hiccup in that I had forgotten to add Technitium2 to the forwarding list on ADDS/DSN2, this thing has worked perfectly.