Windows – Split DNS for a VPN site without a server

domain-name-systemsplit-dnsvpnwindows

So here's my current setup:

Home:
RV220W

Office:
RV042

I have an IPSEC VPN running fine and dandy. Everything pings. I can manually nslookup to my dns servers over the VPN just fine.

Now, despite what Cisco may claim, RV220W doesn't have a working split DNS. I'm abandoning even trying that method. It's a buggy router, but the VPN works, so I'm going to work with what I have. It's one of only Cisco routers that has Gigabit WAN, Wireless and IPSEC connectivity. The other has slower VPN performance, so I'm staying with it.

At home, I have two Windows 8 desktops that I want to add to the domain to make things easier. Let's ignore PPTP/L2TP/SSDP for now and I just want to work with IPSEC.

I don't have a server here to home to use as a DNS server with conditional forwarding or to replicate the Server 2008 R2 DNS.

I figured it's probably easier to do the split DNS on the two local machines than start killing one of my machine's resources to run a VM.

Now, all I would want is to if a DNS requests *.mydomainname.com, then query 10.0.0.1 and/or 10.0.0.6 (my work's DNS servers).

I haven't found anything in windows that'll let me do that. I came up with is write a service that will query my DNS servers for my domain's forward lookup zone and write that into windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Theoretically, it would work.

I think looked into BIND, but to be honest, I find it far too confusing to use.

I would just want (in pseudocode):

if (domainsuffix == "mydomainname.com")
  return: requestedHostname from 10.0.0.1;
else
  return: default;

Best Answer

I use dnsmasq for my DNS (and DHCP) server at home; configuration is very straightforward:

server=/somedomain.local/<ip.of.your.work.dns.server>

You can build a tiny Linux virtual machine with dnsmasq running on VirtualBox, leave it running all the time; you'll never notice it.