Ian Leader: I’ve been using a LinkSys (now Cisco) WRT54GL as my home WiFi / router / firewall for about four years, and particularly since the OpenWrt initiative released the WhiteRussian version of their open source firmware, it’s been a joy to use: a fully-featured, flexible web GUI with both simple and advanced administration modes, access to a very wide range of linux packages, and a plugin architecture in the web GUI that allows you to add and configure a great deal of them without getting your hands dirty.
However, the hardware’s old and doesn’t support 802.11N wifi, so I bought a Fonera 2.0n. As well as 802.11N, it’s got a host of other features like USB support (for storage or webcams, or…) and applications to handle uploads and downloads to Picasa, FaceBook, Torrents and other applications / protocols. It’s also based on OpenWrt, and uses a version of the same Luci user interface.
Unfortunately, for my setup there was one key difference: There’s a module called dnsmasq on both platforms that runs a DNS server (amongst other things), and allows you to specify DNS entries for local servers. In OpenWrt WhiteRusian this is pretty simple: You add entries to /etc/hosts.local in the normal format e.g.
192.168.1.100 server1
Then reboot the device (this is pretty brute force, but simpler than remembering which init.d / rc.d script to run). Other settings like the DNS suffix (e.g. myhouse.mydomain.com) can be set in the web UI.
The Fonera doesn’t play nicely like this, and there simply doesn’t seem to be any file pre-configured where you can add entries, nor does it let you set the DNS suffix through the web UI. Here’s how I made it work:
Continue reading ‘Adding DNS entries to a Fonera 2.0n or what’s FON really about?’