How to setup a local DNS server on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)

binddnsosx lion

I had some serious lag to resolve website address and sometimes things simply wouldn’t load; pages keep loading for 5+ minutes without even a timeout error. So I had setup a local DNS server/cache using BIND on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Now that I have Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), I have the same problem, but the instructions no longer apply to Mac OS X 10.7 and I can’t find a way to do it.

Has anyone attempted to do this? Are there viable alternatives for DNS servers on Mac OS X 10.7?

For those who are wondering I already tried using several external DNS servers. Only my computer has this issue on the network.

Best Answer

You clearly have problems with DNS transactions on your local machine. If you decide to run a DNS server to resolve them, you may hit exactly the same problem - when you will request a DNS entry, which is not resolvable by your DNS server, that server will have to request the entry from an external DNS - and here you go, with the same problem.

If you decide not to run your own DNS server on your desktop computer (which i believe to be best practice), there is some steps you can try to investigate your DNS problem in more depth. Some of them would be:

Try using 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as DNS servers
Use a packet capture software to capture DNS traffic while you are sending DNS requests out - in-depth analysis of the packets brings light to the problem very often. Watch the DNS transactions and try to identify the bottleneck

You can use Wireshark for any network packet analysis.

Look f9or UDP connection with SRC port 53.

Regards,

http://catcher.hdcs.cz

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We use dnsmasq for exactly this. You can create CNAME records, which define a name aliased to some other, real, name, by editing the configuration files; it's really easy.

Here's some of what we've put in our /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

domain=initech.office
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We have machines called balham, bank, and victoria. We've set up CNAMEs for vpn.initech.office and so on which point to them.

We run it on Linux, but it runs on OS X too.

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As you noted, Lion doesn't have a checkbox to turn the FTP server on anymore.

However, the back-end (ftpd itself) is still there, and you can still enable it manually from the command line by telling launchd to enable and load the existing launchd entry for it or simply running ftpd manually (cf. this thread on MacRumors). Consult the launchd, launchctl, launchd.plist, and ftpd man pages for details, but the basic command to start the ftpd server on the default port is:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist

As was suggested on the MacRumors thread, you may want to take this opportunity to migrate to SFTP or another more secure, better-supported protocol.

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