isle/docs/user/using-dns.md

Using DNS

Every isle daemon process ships with a DNS server which runs automatically. This server will listen on port 53 on the VPN IP of that particular host.

The server will serve requests for <hostname>.hosts.<domain> hostnames, where <hostname> is the name of any host in the network, and <domain> is the network's domain name.

If a request for a hostname not within the network's domain is received then the server will forward the request to a pre-configured public resolver. The set of public resolvers used can be configured using the daemon.yml file.

This DNS server is an optional feature of Isle, and not required in general for making use of the network.

Example

As an example of how to make use of this DNS server, let's say my host's IP on the network is 10.10.1.1, and my network's domain is cool.internal. In order to configure the host to use the isle DNS server for all DNS requests, I could do something like this:

sudo su
echo "nameserver 10.10.1.1" > /etc/resolv.conf

From that point, all DNS requests on my host would hit the isle DNS server. If I request my-host.hosts.cool.internal, it would respond with the appropriate private IP.

NOTE that configuration of dns resolvers is very OS-specific, even amongst Linux distributions, so ensure you know how your resolver configuration works before doing this.