Name Services
Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource participating in the Internet. It associates various information with domain names assigned to such participants. Most importantly, it translates humanly meaningful domain names to numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices world-wide.
Syneto UTM permits DNS services configuration for the following purposes:
- Internal name to IP resolution
- Internal DNS cacheing to preserve network bandwidth and speed up DNS requests; this will greatly improve services using DNS such as DNSBL email blacklist access
- DNS cacheing for the internal network to preserve bandwidth and speed up DNS requests from the internal network
All these name server related configurations are done from the System -> Name Services menu (Figure 1). Here you will configure:
- DNS Server List: a list of external name servers where all DNS requests will be forwarded
- FQDN: Fully Qualified Domain Name – contains both the hostname and the domain name separated by ‘.’ (dot): configuring the FQDN to gateway.example.com will set the host name to gateway and the local search domain to example.com
- DNS Cache: activating internal DNS cache will prevent frequent DNS queries to be served from the memory instead of going requesting the same name from the external name servers
- Interfaces to allow DNS queries to the DNS cache; if no interface is selected, then the DNS cache will only be used internally.
Figure 1. Configuring name services
Name server configuration may also be done from the SSH, video or RS232 consoles using these commands:
$ config ns set 10.0.0.1 [10.0.0.2 etc.] -Set any number of name servers
$ config ns add 10.0.0.3 [10.0.0.4 etc.] -Add any number of name servers
$ config ns del 10.0.0.1 [10.0.0.4 etc.] -Delete any number of name servers
$ config ns flush -Delete all configured name servers
$ config ns show -Show configured name servers
$ config fqdn set localhost.localdomain -Set the FQDN for this host
$ config fqdn clear -Remove the defined FQDN
$ config fqdn show -Show the defined FQDN