Changing DNS on Smoothwall RED interface

OmegaXero

Senior member
Apr 11, 2001
248
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0
Hey guys and gals, I've been frustrated as of late. This past week it seems as though RR's DNS servers have slowed to a crawl. I'll type in google.com into firefox and wait a good 3 seconds before the name resolves and the web page pops up. I've been able to fix this by specifying a different range of DNS servers in my tcp/ip properties within XP. I want to change these settings on my router however, it gets its external IP assigned by RR DHCP. I use smoothwall express 2.0 and I can't find an option that lets me overide the specified DHCP name servers with the IPs of my choice. This basically boils down to two questions.

1) Does anyone know how to FORCE smoothwall to use a different name server than the one given to it upon receiving its external DHCP address?

2) Does anyone know of a free firewall other than smoothwall that will let me do this (I've tried coyotelinux, m0n0wall, and ipcop so far with no luck)?
 

cleverhandle

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 2001
3,566
3
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Smoothwall is just some kind of Linux (correct?), so you should be able to set the DHCP client to ignore or supersede the DHCP server's info. There are a couple of different DHCP clients out there, but I think most everything uses dhclient these days. If you have a dhclient.conf file somewhere in /etc, you should be able to add the line

supersede domain-name-servers [desired nameserver's IP here]

 

OmegaXero

Senior member
Apr 11, 2001
248
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Correct, it is some kind of Linux, however I can't find the dhclient.conf in the /etc folder. I'm not much of a Linux guru (I barely know my way around as it is), where else could I look? What are some other DHCP Clients that Linux has been known to use? Thanks for the reply!
 

OmegaXero

Senior member
Apr 11, 2001
248
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Mad props cleverhandle, you literally were right on the ball. Smoothwall uses the dhcpcd however, I followed this link and was able to resolve my problem. Thanks to you I actually knew what I was looking for!