DNS
Small Office Monitoring: The 12 Checks That Catch Real Outages
A small-office monitoring guide covering WAN, DNS, DHCP, router health, captive portals, APs, PoE, UPS, local services, backups, and alerting.
Captive Portal Triage: Connected, No Login Page, No Internet
Find the first failed captive-portal layer, from association and addressing through discovery, authentication, access policy and upstream routing. Compare clients and preserve logs before changing settings; discovery and NAT behavior depend on the design.
DNS Privacy vs DNS Filtering: Stop Mixing Up the Jobs
A DNS guide explaining the difference between encrypted DNS, DNSSEC, Protective DNS, malware filtering, parental controls, and resolver bypass.
DNS Drift: Why Your Router, Browser, VPN, and Phone Use Different Resolvers
A detailed DNS audit for home networks and homelabs where router DHCP, browser Secure DNS, VPN clients, IPv6, and mobile Private DNS do not agree.
Private DNS for Homelabs Without Leaking Internal Services
Plan private homelab naming with home.arpa or an owned domain, split DNS, VPN resolution, and certificate choices, then check public records and recovery from each client network.
Home DNS Without a Single Point of Failure: Pi-hole, AdGuard Home, and Technitium
Design Pi-hole, AdGuard Home, or Technitium DNS around consistent records, independent resolver failure domains, and client failover tests, with a documented recovery path before changing DHCP.
DHCP vs DNS: What Breaks When Each One Fails
Separate DHCP configuration faults from DNS lookup failures: inspect the client's address and gateway first, then test the configured resolver; a failed ping alone proves neither.
Fix DNS Once: Router vs PC vs Browser, and How to Stop Settings Fighting
Trace router, operating-system, browser, VPN, and IPv6 DNS paths separately, then change one policy layer at a time and verify actual application behavior with rollback available.
How Do You Make DNS Keep Working When the Internet Is Down?
Serve local names without depending on a public resolver, and plan resolver-host resilience separately from WAN resilience. Test real client paths while recognizing that local DNS cannot replace cloud authentication or uncached public answers.
Homelab DNS Guide: Local Names, Ad Blocking, and Reliability
A practical homelab DNS design for local names, ad blocking, split DNS, redundant resolvers, VPN clients, and safe internal naming.