NAT table in an RV 120W? (Equivalent of hosts file)

[asbardella]

Hi all,

I'm fumbling my way through administering the small biz network for the satellite office I work out of. We're using an RV120W Small Business router. The problem I have is that when people visit the office from our main site, their Outlook connections won't work because they're set up to use a local server address, since usually they're on the same LAN as the email server. The server is externally accessible, so all I need to do is set up an entry in their hosts file translating the network alias (server.local) to the external IP. However, this is obviously pretty time consuming and requires them to switch it off whenever they're back on the main site, so I figured surely there's a way to do it automatically in our router instead? Unfortunately though, I can't seem to find what this might be called anywhere, despite having Googled til I was blue in the face and prodding around in every page of the router config. Can anyone help explain how it might be done? Is there an equivalent of the hosts file, or a DNS table, or something like that?

Thanks!

Alex

[raparash]

hi Alex,

what DNS server are the hosts currently using for name resolution?

say in your case, your DNS server is 10.10.10.10/24 and all your clients are seeing the router(say 10.10.10.1/24) as their gateway.

what you can do here is to set-up your router itself as the primary DNS server where you create a mapping for the mail server against the private IP address of the server. you would need to edit your DHCP config for this and set the DNS server to be 10.10.10.1

And on the router, set your DNS server(10.10.10.10) as the forwarding address on the router.

So basically this is how this is going to work:

 

The clients are going to see the router as their primary DNS server. All

DNS query requests will first be sent to the router. the router will

resolve for the mail server to it's INTERNAL IP address. For all other queries( for eg hosts

trying to reach google.com) will be forwarded by the router to the 10.10.10.10 DNS server.

here is how you can configure your router for this:

1.       Ip dns server

 

2.       Ip host  10.10.20.1  -------------mapped the domain name to the IP address

 

3.       Ip name-server 10.10.10.10 ------------set the previously configured DNS as the forwarding address

 

4.       Ip domain look-up

i have tried this solution once and it worked fine. let me know if it works for you.