Forwarding

Forwarding

Maybe some domain names must be sent to an internal DNS server to be resolved.

Maybe you'd like queries for your local domain to go to your router, and not to an upstream DNS resolver. By doing so, names of your local online devices can be found.

This also prevents internal names from being sent to 3rd party servers.

While all the DNS traffic is usually meant to be sent to secure channels, you can add "exceptions" that will be sent, unencrypted, as regular DNS queries, to specific hosts.

This is the purpose of the forwarding_rules parameter:

forwarding_rules = 'forwarding-rules.txt'

This loads a file named forwarding-rules.txt with a set of rules with the following syntax:

example.com 192.168.2.44
example.net 114.114.114.114

Here, queries for example.com and example.net will not go through DNSCrypt or DNS-over-HTTP/2. They will be exceptions, sent using regular DNS, to other DNS servers: 192.168.2.44 and 114.114.114.114.

This is different from cloaking: the IP address is the IP address of a DNS resolver, not the IP address returned to the client.

Patterns are not supported. Suffix-matching is always done: www.example.com will go to 192.168.2.44 in the example above.

Multiple comma-separated IP addresses can be specified:

example.com 192.168.2.1,192.168.2.2

They will be tried in random order.

Forwarding can make encrypted DNS and services incompatible with encrypted DNS play well with each other.

But most people may want to only redirect their local domain (for example .localdomain) to their router IP address.

Load-balancing options