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Domain Names for Disconnected Networks

By Jeffrey Howard
All rights reserved unless noted otherwise

Many people set up house networks. Their networks connect to the outside world via dial-up connections, cable modems, or DSL. They want the convenience of name service for their machines on the house network, but those machines may not have public IP addresses; more often they have addresses the 10.0.0.0 or 192.168.0.0 address ranges, behind a masquerading firewall.

Solution

For IP addressing, things are easy; there are networks such as 10.0.0.0 and 192.168.0.0 set aside for non-connected network. For DNS, unless you register your name no one will ever no what names your nameserver is serving.

So go wild. Adopt any name you want, and serve it off of your nameserver. No one else will know or care. I do recommend, though, that you pick a name that is what you would register if you were to go online with a dedicated connection. That way, if you ever do upgrade to a dedicated connection, you have a minimum of reconfiguration to do. Or, if you have some spare cash, go ahead and register the name in case you ever need it.

If you find that setting up a DNS server just for a few machines is overkill, you can, with any flavor of UNIX, just use /etc/hosts to hand enter the names and addresses of machines on your network. Microsoft operating system products have a similar means to hand-configure name and address pairings.