DNS Forwarding

Use DNS forwarding if you want your router to function as a DNS server for the local network. There are several options, the easiest being ‘forward all traffic to the system DNS server(s)’ (defined with set system name-server):

set service dns forwarding system

Manually setting DNS servers for forwarding:

set service dns forwarding name-server 8.8.8.8
set service dns forwarding name-server 8.8.4.4

Manually setting DNS servers with IPv6 connectivity:

set service dns forwarding name-server 2001:4860:4860::8888
set service dns forwarding name-server 2001:4860:4860::8844

Setting a forwarding DNS server for a specific domain:

set service dns forwarding domain example.com server 192.0.2.1

Set which networks or clients are allowed to query the DNS Server. Allow from all:

set service dns forwarding allow-from 0.0.0.0/0

Example 1

Router with two interfaces eth0 (WAN link) and eth1 (LAN). Split DNS for example.com.

DNS request for a local domain (example.com) get forwarded to 192.0.2.1
Other DNS requests are forwarded to Google’s DNS servers.
The IP address for the LAN interface is 192.168.0.1.

set service dns forwarding domain example.com server 192.0.2.1
set service dns forwarding name-server 8.8.8.8
set service dns forwarding name-server 8.8.4.4
set service dns forwarding listen-address 192.168.0.1
set service dns forwarding allow-from 0.0.0.0/0

Example 2

Same as example 1 but with additional IPv6 addresses for Google’s public DNS servers.

The IP addresses for the LAN interface are 192.168.0.1 and 2001:db8::1

set service dns forwarding domain example.com server 192.0.2.1
set service dns forwarding name-server 8.8.8.8
set service dns forwarding name-server 8.8.4.4
set service dns forwarding name-server 2001:4860:4860::8888
set service dns forwarding name-server 2001:4860:4860::8844
set service dns forwarding listen-address 2001:db8::1
set service dns forwarding listen-address 192.168.0.1
set service dns forwarding allow-from 0.0.0.0/0

Dynamic DNS

VyOS is able to update a remote DNS record when an interface gets a new IP address. In order to do so, VyOS includes ddclient, a perl script written for this exact purpose.

ddclient uses two methods to update a DNS record. The first one will send updates directly to the DNS daemon, in compliance with RFC2136. The second one involves a third party service, like DynDNS.com or any other similar website. This method uses HTTP requests to transmit the new IP address. You can configure both in VyOS.

VyOS CLI and RFC2136

First, create an RFC2136 config node :

edit service dns dynamic interface eth0 rfc2136 <confignodename>

Present your RNDC key to ddclient :

set key /config/dyndns/mydnsserver.rndc.key

Set the DNS server IP/FQDN :

set server dns.mydomain.com

Set the NS zone to be updated :

set zone mydomain.com

Set the records to be updated :

set record dyn
set record dyn2

You can optionally set a TTL (note : default value is 600 seconds) :

set ttl 600

This will generate the following ddclient config blocks:

server=dns.mydomain.com
protocol=nsupdate
password=/config/dyndns/mydnsserver.rndc.key
ttl=600
zone=mydomain.com
dyn
server=dns.mydomain.com
protocol=nsupdate
password=/config/dyndns/mydnsserver.rndc.key
ttl=600
zone=mydomain.com
dyn2

You can also keep a different dns zone updated. Just create a new config node:

edit service dns dynamic interface eth0 rfc2136 <confignode2>

VyOS CLI and HTTP dynamic DNS services

VyOS is also able to use any service relying on protocols supported by ddclient.

To use such a service, you must define a login, a password, one or multiple hostnames, a protocol and a server.

edit service dns dynamic interface eth0 service HeNet
set login my-login # set password my-password
set host-name my-tunnel-id
set protocol dyndns2
set server ipv4.tunnelbroker.net

VyOS is also shipped with a list of known services. You don’t need to set the protocol and server value as VyOS has defaults provided for those. These are the services VyOS knows about:

afraid
changeip
dnspark
dslreports
dyndns
easydns
namecheap
noip
zoneedit

To use DynDNS for example:

edit service dns dynamic interface eth0 service dyndns
set login my-login
set password my-password
set host-name my-dyndns-hostname

It’s possible to use multiple services :

edit service dns dynamic interface eth0 service dyndns
set login my-login
set password my-password
set host-name my-dyndns-hostname
edit service dns dynamic interface eth0 service HeNet
set login my-login
set password my-password
set host-name my-tunnel-id
set protocol dyndns2
set server ipv4.tunnelbroker.net

ddclient behind NAT

By default, ddclient will update a dynamic dns record using the IP address directly attached to the interface. If your VyOS instance is behind NAT, your record will be updated to point to your internal IP.

ddclient has another way to determine the WAN IP address. This is controlled by these two options:

set service dns dynamic interface eth0 use-web url
set service dns dynamic interface eth0 use-web skip

ddclient will load the webpage at [url] and will try to extract an IP address for the response. ddclient will skip any address located before the string set in [skip].