Best Practices Question for Merlin Settings

[Authority]

Enable local NTP server / Intercept NTP client requests - What would be a use case for this feature? How often does the router update the time and whats the drift? Would this best be used in combination with scheduled reboot?

Reboot Schuedluer - use it? Why/why not? How often?

Wan: Use local caching DNS server as system resolver (default: No) - why is this off by default and how does it work DoT is on?

Thanks in advamce.

 

[RMerlin]

Enable local NTP server / Intercept NTP client requests - What would be a use case for this feature?

To ensure that all the clients on your LAN which use NTP but don't always let you configure a specific server will use the one you chose. This can be important for instance when some devices use poorly chosen hardcoded server, and these servers might go down at some point. D-Link did that a few years ago, except they picked a smallish NTP server, and its administrator had the nasty surprise of seeing his server suddenly flooded with hundreds of thousands of requests - it was never built to handle that kind of load...

Reboot Schuedluer - use it? Why/why not? How often?

Never used that. Probably situational.

Wan: Use local caching DNS server as system resolver (default: No) - why is this off by default and how does it work DoT is on?

It's off to prevent potential issues with special setups, for instance ISPs that use a DHCP+VPN type of WAN connection. It also prevents chances of WAN state detection failing due to local caching. You should leave that disabled, unless you had a very good reason to enable it.

 

[Authority]

To ensure that all the clients on your LAN which use NTP but don't always let you configure a specific server will use the one you chose. This can be important for instance when some devices use poorly chosen hardcoded server, and these servers might go down at some point. D-Link did that a few years ago, except they picked a smallish NTP server, and its administrator had the nasty surprise of seeing his server suddenly flooded with hundreds of thousands of requests - it was never built to handle that kind of load...



Never used that. Probably situational.



It's off to prevent potential issues with special setups, for instance ISPs that use a DHCP+VPN type of WAN connection. It also prevents chances of WAN state detection failing due to local caching. You should leave that disabled, unless you had a very good reason to enable it.

I’ve always been a fan of DNS caching for performance. I use it at work on Edgerouter as well.


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[RMerlin]

I’ve always been a fan of DNS caching for performance. I use it at work on Edgerouter as well.


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NTP interception has nothing to do with DNS caching (or caching of any kind actually).

 

[dosborne]

Reboot Schuedluer - use it? Why/why not? How often?

I'm old school. I like to reboot my devices nightly or at least weekly to ensure they operate correctly without memory or other issues. Conversely, I tend to run NAS units as long as humanly possible without rebooting.

For a router, and most devices in general, even though I'm in the habit of nightly reboots, I wouldn't classify it as necessary. But, if you find your router locks up every couple of weeks for some unknown reason, then a automatic reboot once a week may prove useful. It all depends on what you run on it, how often you monitor it, if you have issues or not,...

 

[Authority]

NTP interception has nothing to do with DNS caching (or caching of any kind actually).

Sorry I got my threads mixed up.


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[Authority]

I'm old school. I like to reboot my devices nightly or at least weekly to ensure they operate correctly without memory or other issues. Conversely, I tend to run NAS units as long as humanly possible without rebooting.

For a router, and most devices in general, even though I'm in the habit of nightly reboots, I wouldn't classify it as necessary. But, if you find your router locks up every couple of weeks for some unknown reason, then a automatic reboot once a week may prove useful. It all depends on what you run on it, how often you monitor it, if you have issues or not,...

Yeah I agree with all that I was just wondering if he recommended reboots I do nightly because why not.


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[heysoundude]

I’ve always been a fan of DNS caching for performance.

Then you might consider getting unbound running on your router.
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/r...ility-for-unbound-recursive-dns-server.61669/
you might enjoy, as I do, the number of 0-1usec lookups after a while...in combination with ad-blocking (a cached list of stuff to deny entry to), it does rather notably speed up your "usual" online activities - I'm most impressed with how quickly my HTPC snaps between IPTV channel streams...I've wondered, in fact, if it sidesteps any IPv6 "speedbumps"
good luck, go fast, have fun, be safe!

 

[RMerlin]

Then you might consider getting unbound running on your router.
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/r...ility-for-unbound-recursive-dns-server.61669/
you might enjoy, as I do, the number of 0-1usec lookups after a while...

You don't need Unbound for that, dnsmasq already does it.

 

[heysoundude]

Ok. But unbound has a GUI so you can see how it’s working [emoji6]


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