Forgive me for my lack of knowledge. I came here because you guys are smart and, hopefully, not mean. I had my DNS resolver in pfsense working and then somehow I broke it. I would like to be able to type freenas.local and get to freenas. It used to work. I can ping freenas.local from within pfsense and it also resolves the IP address within pfsense, but when I ping from anywhere else or type the name in a browser it fails. In a browser it puts www in front of freenas.local and then fails. It used to not do that. I do have several DNS servers configured on the General >> Setup tab. Under DNS >> host overides I have several devices listed including freenas.local @ 192.168.1.142. Typing the IP address works, but not the address. Thanks in advance for the help.
It sounds to me like your local machine isn’t set up to use pfSense as the DNS server.
Try changing your DNS settings to use the pfSense IP address
Sorry… but… what? I thought when pfSense was set up as DNS server, it was set? What settings are you talking about, specifically? Thank you!
your local machine may be pointed at another server for DNS, check that the pfSense box is the first its asking. under your pfSense DHCP settings you should see that the DNS its handing out is its self first and then a secondary of whatever else.
so DHCP should be handing out something like:
main:192.168.1.1
alt1: 1.1.1.1
The first DNS server listed in pfSense is 127.0.0.1. However, when I look in my ubuntu laptop it shows DNS servers of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Perhaps I have set them separately on my local machines and that is preventing them from reaching .local. If the DNS server is set on a local machine does that override what is in pfSense? I just checked a VM I have running where I would not have tinkered with DNS and it works. So I must have it set locally somehow.
Thanks, you guys are great.
Yeah you want your machines to have pfsense as their (only) dns server, if they have something else then all dns requests will go to that server which won’t know what’s on your local network. If it worked on the VM then you dhcp is probably set up correctly and you must have manually set dns on the Ubuntu machine.
I know this is a terrible question, but just for absolute clarity the local DNS server is the IP address of the router, in my case 192.168.1.1?
That’s right
Thanks. I found out that in pfSense in the LAN DHCP settings I had added DNS servers. On another computer, where I also had the issue, I had added a DNS server too. I appreciate the help. This was a good learning experience for me.