It’s funny you posted on this topic because I’ve been doing a bunch of research into DNS this past week. I moved and started using my mac mini server behind a Qwest DSL modem doing port forwarding to the mini. It worked great for computers elsewhere on the internet, but all of my local machines on the same private network were no longer able to access the mini by the domain name (a common problem with some routers, including the old graphite AirPort basestations). Apparently the router gets confused when it does a lookup of the domain name’s IP address and finds it to be its own, so it passes the traffic directly back to the computer that initiated it, instead of obeying its port-forwarding rules, or something.

The solution, it seems, is to run “split DNS”. The DNS server on the internet that is responsible for your domains stays configured as beore, but you also run a local DNS server on the mac mini server (or any other computer on your local network) which processes all of the DNS requests for the network and grabs requests for the domain names on the network and translates it into the 10.0.x.x private IP of the server, instead of the publicly accessible internet IP address. Other requests are forwarded to DNS servers on the internet (and OpenDNS could be used, as John states above).

I haven’t bought and installed the software yet, but cutedgesystems has written a gui that should do just the trick for configuring BIND to make this a relatively easy project. It’s called DNS Enabler, and the website is here: http://cutedgesystems.com/software/DNSEnabler/ . I don’t work for this company, and I’m not a customer yet, even, but unless anyone else has better ideas or suggestions, I think this is the direction I’m going to go.

-Nate

Cheers,

John Roberts
OpenDNS