Part of me is thinking that a “better” approach would be to Have dc as the DNS used and add NxFilter and perhaps even dc as forwarding DNS servers in dc. But I’m not sure it is the “correct” way. Now, this seems to actually work out fine. Since router‘s list of DNS servers includes dc NxFilter first tries to resolve and applies its rules, then if needed it forwards to router which in turn looks up domain stuff using dc. I then simply just added the IP of the NxFilter installation to be the first DNS Server in the list of DNS Servers handed out by the DHCP Server on router and added the IP of router and it’s DNS Resolver as the upstream DNS server of NxFilter. To try I just installed NxFilter as a docker container on server with it’s own LAN ip. But, I’m starting to feel that it might be a bit “to many” DNS’s involved in my setup and that I might not be doing it in the “correct” way. My idea is to be able to do more fine grained DNS filtering with that for the kids based on their Domain Users. The Active Directory on the domain works fine, internal hostnames work fine and external hosts are resolved correctly.īut, now I was thinking about addin NxFilter to the mix. I had set the DHCP Server on router to give the ip of dc as the first DNS server and then dc uses router as a forwarding DNS for things outside my own network.

Since I have three children in the house it also allows me to apply basic DNS filtering based “protection” against certain “known things” by running BlockerNG and Snort (although I still need more time to configure this).

It allows it (and me) to easily add specific hostnames for an ip, reroute stuff etc. For instance server would have issues asking for a DHCP lease from dc if it hadn’t started the VM of dc first. Mostly because it’s handy to log into the webadmin of pfSense to fix things instead of using Remote Desktop to login to dc and also since dc is a VM and depending on a reboot of its host server might not be up when I need it to. The router is acting as the DHCP server, although I have heard that it’s prefered to let dc handle it. I then have another physical machine acting as my router running pfsense ( router). I have a setup consisting of a physical server ( server) running Ubuntu, on that, a Windows 2016 Server running as a VM serves as a Domain Controller ( dc).

Pfsense force dns to nxfilter