Best DNS practice for two home networks?

[dionhouston]

Hello everyone,

I'm a greater than novice, but less than Jedi Master on networking. My Dad was a technophile with a bunch of different hardware connected to his home network. He has passed now, and I'm trying to manage the networking of both locations. Thanks to another tutorial on this site, I now successfully have 192.168.50.0/24 at home connected to 192.168.1.0/24 at the other through an OVPN connection. The networking works flawlessly - I can contact any device from either network by IP. I am currently connecting them through my ASUS RT-AX88U to a Synology NAS, but wil be moving the connection to another RT-AX88U next week.

My question is what is the best practice for unifying DNS? I.e. machine.local.home1.net and machine.local.home2.net resolve correctly at either location?

I've thought...

• Real DNS. Both my Dad and I have personal domains, and I could put machines into it with class C addresses. This seems to be overkill, and would have to be maintained.
• Dnsmasq - Server line. What does work is server lines like server=/home2.net/192.168.1.1 . Right now I can't do this on the flip side (Dad's current router doesn't support that). This isn't a bad solution, I just question if it's the right one.
• Dnsmasq - multiple hosts file? I know it is capable of it, I'm not sure how I'd easily expose the hosts file from the other router.
• Dnsmasq - multiple subnets? This seems unlikely to be a good solution - first I don't think it's possible, but DHCP from a remote site leads to the possibility of the entire house going down if mine is somehow not available.

Anyway, there are probably many other ways to do this, but just curious - what do the smart people on this do? Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom...

 

[sfx2000]

You have things working for the moment it sounds like...

At some point, as you're asking, how to merge the two domains - and there's a lot of options.

In DNS, if you go upstream, you have many options with DNS records - first step perhaps would be a CNAME on one of the DNS records, e.g. pointing one to another, and then migrate from there...

 

[dionhouston]

You have things working for the moment it sounds like...

At some point, as you're asking, how to merge the two domains - and there's a lot of options.

In DNS, if you go upstream, you have many options with DNS records - first step perhaps would be a CNAME on one of the DNS records, e.g. pointing one to another, and then migrate from there...

That is an exceptionally good point. I don't think my Dad ever used his domain for machines at home, but it's not going to make sense to hold on to his domain indefinitely. Putting everything into just my domain (optionally with CNAMEs from the other one) would allow me to have one DNS for wherever things are. Hmmmm... (hard to tell I'm not a big fan of maintaining DNS records, huh?)

 

[tgl]

FWIW, I've run my own DNS servers for a long time (decades). There are a couple of reasons to do it: one is that you can easily add entries for your own domain that will not be visible outside your LAN, which seems like more or less what you want here. Another one, which might be less important in these days of gigabit home connections, is that DNS lookup results can get cached locally to your LAN rather than having to go out to your ISP's servers every time.

I remember the setup as being a bit daunting way back when, but now any decent Linux distro should offer a BIND or dnsmasq package that comes with reasonable skeleton configuration files.