Self Hosting – Local DNS resolution network wide?

Hey guys, I just wanted to share a little trick I stumble on and that I find works SUPER well! Basically, I do have a bunch of services running on my servers (which is probably the expected behaviour of having a rack with servers in 🤓). These services all have different IPs (gotta love containerization) and port and sometimes you get on something that will want to run on port 8203 for some reason… but remembering that service ‘ABC’ on IP ‘192.168.4.152’ is on port 8203… can be a bit tricky, especially with several service. One option is to have a lookup notebook next to your pc to know what is where… or the normal people will decide to have an A Record in their DNS to resolve it. It is indeed easy to just add the record to the router but it doesn’t solve the port issue.

What I ended up doing:

Faced with the problem, I thought to reuse my Reverse proxy manager that I use for the blog! Since I already have a proxy manager setup, I thought to simply point my DNS on the router to the proxy manager IP, and when the proxy manager receive the request, it has hosts configured that tells ‘this address, points to this IP and port’ so instead of having to enter ‘myservice.etek-lab.com:4536’, I can simply skip the IP entirely since it’s set in the proxy manager!

Also, in order to have a clean ‘inside and outside’ split so external addresses don’t accidentally point to the inside network, I had to implement an ‘allowed/denied’ setup, based on the requester’s address. If it comes from inside the network, it is allowed to resolve the address; otherwise, it can’t!

On top of that, enabling stuff like SSL is also possible throught the proxy manager!

So, if you need to find an elegant solution for remembering the IPs and port of all your services, it might be a good idea to consider a proxy manager internally! 😀

Hope it helped!