pfsense DNS Forwarding and Overrides

I ran into a small DNS issue when I first rolled out our pfsense firewall.  I had 4 active interfaces: inside, outside, dmz and wireless.   On the PIX I had the wireless segment go directly to the Internet for name resolution.  Requests for “inside” services (on the inside or dmz interfaces) were NAT’ed so that the outside public addresses worked correctly. Not wanting to mess with all that NATing again, I was stuck because the rules I wrote were based on private ip addresses which wouldn’t be resolved correctly by a public DNS server.  So after messing around a little I found that when set up as a DNS forwarder, the pfsense box will allow you override specific DNS entries or even an entire domain.  Very very cool.  I simply added the names I wanted to resolve to the override list with their internal ip addresses and bang!  The only requirement was DNS forwarding had to be enabled and the pfsense box was acting as the DHCP server on the wireless interface.  Simply leave the DNS values empty and pfsense will advertise itself as the DNS server to DHCP clients.

pfsense rocks the house!