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Questions for DD-WRT and OpenWRT users...

A

arcas

Platinum Member
Currently I have a dedicated machine set up as a router for my local network at home. I operate two network segments: untrusted wireless (restricted, traffic-shaped) and a wired ethernet. I currently treat my WRT as a mere access point. All routing, DHCP and DDNS services are performed on the dedicated machine with 3 NICs; the WRT hangs off that machine.

I'd like to refactor the network so that the WRT does all the routing (and possibly DDNS) using DD-WRT or OpenWRT.


My questions:

I run dynamic DNS on my local net (some machines might be attached via wireless or wired at any given time...ddns allows me to access them in either case without prior knowledge of how they're connected). In order to do this, the DHCP and BIND daemons have to cooperate and this requires access to their respective configuration files and the sharing of the rndc key.

So to duplicate this on the WRT I would:

a) need access to the dhcpd.conf file. Do DD-WRT and OpenWRT run ISC dhcpd or do they run a custom DHCP server?

b) It would be nice to run DNS services on the WRT as well. Do either of these replacement firmwares offer bind9?

I've glanced at the various Wikis for these two firmwares and the only references I see made about DDNS is how to be a client to an external internet DDNS server (ie. so that you can give a name to your router so that you can access it from, say, the office). I don't see anything about setting up or supporting DDNS on the internal network.

Any clues? Is it possible or am I asking too much of these WRT firmwares?

 
You have to subscribe to a service that provides you with DDNS.

Once you subscribe you to a service you have a "name" and you can configure the credential to the Router.

Example for such service. http://www.dyndns.org

Look to the left under free DNS.

dyndns.org accounts can be inserted to the Router's menu.

In general about the topic http://www.ezlan.net/myip.html

 
See, that's what I'm saying. I'm not looking to give the router a name visible to the external internet. I already have that via what is essentially a static IP (technically it's still DHCP but it rarely changes and since I help run an OpenSRS registrar, updating our external DNS with my new IP is trivial if it ever does change).

Instead, I run DDNS inside my private network at home so that machines on my network, even those configured via DHCP, can refer to each other by name. A simple example would be my laptop. It always uses DHCP but it might be on the wireless subnet one day and be plugged into the wall (which is a different subnet) the next day. My local DDNS takes care of this so that other machines on my net see it as "foo" regardless of which subnet it's on.

I suppose one could still use an external DDNS service like dyndns.org (we don't support DDNS on our external OpenSRS name server) so long as it doesn't block updates for 10. and 192.168. IPs. That's a rather unclean solution, though, since it'd require each machine on my private net to run a special client. It also would not allow reverse lookups should one be necessary (hey, I'm stretching here)...

 
no you run dns on your internal network. the dynamic part of dns doesn't make it DDNS.

why don't you setup dns/dhcp on a windows server and it can handle updating the PTR and A records. Might add a domain too to keep unwanted folks farther away.

Better yet; use static leasing to assign your machines (and only your machines) on the network. then you can use static dns or hosts entries since their ip will be fixed forever.

 
Originally posted by: Emulex
why don't you setup dns/dhcp on a windows server and it can handle updating the PTR and A records. Might add a domain too to keep unwanted folks farther away.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's basically the setup I have today (well except it's Linux running bind9 and isc dhcpd, not Windows). My question was whether DD-WRT and/or OpenWRT were sufficiently robust to shift those services off of an 80-100watt PC and onto my 7.5watt Linksys WRT. Guess I'll have to try and see...

 
arcas, for OpenWRT,

http://downloads.openwrt.org/k...ver_3.1.0-1_mipsel.ipk

is ISC DHCP. There are others, such as dnsmasq, if you prefer, which are smaller. In all cases you can tweak the config however you want.

http://downloads.openwrt.org/k....5.0-P1-1.1_mipsel.ipk

is BIND 9. Again, there are others, like dnsmasq, that are smaller, and you've got the config if you want it. (for DDNS, though, I think your options are limited. Do you really need DDNS at home? Why not just use static DHCP and static names?)

For what you're trying to do, I think OpenWRT will work well and save a lot of electricity.
 
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