Dnsmasq is Linux utility which provides DNS, DHCP, TFTP and DNS caching capabilities. It’s a very lightweight service, is available for most Linux distribution, and has found wide adoption for Android as well as OS X users. In this post, we’ll talk about the DNS caching part.
Installation
This could be my shortest post yet! Because if you want add DNS caching on your Linux box, it is as simple as this:
sudo apt-get install dnsmasq
That’s it!
If you want to test what difference this makes, I recommend using dig because it depicts the time it takes to do a DNS lookup. So, let’s try to resolve “netbeez.net” with dig (I am using the “+noall +stats” options to make the output more readable):
$ dig +noall +stats netbeez.net ;; Query time: 23 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) ;; WHEN: Tue Oct 29 10:24:05 PDT 2019 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 56
As you can see, this lookup took 23 mseconds. Now, if I rerun the same command the lookup will take 0 mseconds!
$ dig +noall +stats netbeez.net ;; Query time: 0 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) ;; WHEN: Tue Oct 29 10:24:09 PDT 2019 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 56
That’s because dnsmasq cached the information after the first lookup, and all subsequent lookups don’t take any time because they are served from the cache.
If you want to clear the DNS cache you have to restart it as follows:
sudo systemctl restart dnsmasq
Configuration
There are few options you can change in the configuration file “/etc/dnsmasq.conf”. Below, I am copying the three options from the configuration file skeleton:
# Set the cachesize here. #cache-size=150 # If you want to disable negative caching, uncomment this. #no-negcache # Normally responses which come from /etc/hosts and the DHCP lease # file have Time-To-Live set as zero, which conventionally means # do not cache further. If you are happy to trade lower load on the # server for potentially stale date, you can set a time-to-live (in # seconds) here. #local-ttl=
The default value for the cache size is 150 and if you set it to 0, you can disable caching. A large cache size might impact performance because dnsmasq keeps all caching in memory.
If you lookup a domain that is invalid (e.g. askdjhfakshdflasjkdflasj.com), by default dnsmasq caches this information and returns “no such domain” from its cache every time you lookup the same invalid domain. If you want to disable this functionality, you can comment in the option ‘no-negcache’
The ‘local-ttl’ option is fully explained in the dnsmasq.conf.
Keep in mind that each time you change an option, you have to restart it with ‘systemctl restart dnsmasq’ to reload the new option. As mentioned above, restarting it clears the cache as well.
How It Works
On Debian-based Linux all DNS servers are listed in the file ‘/etc/resolv.conf’ For example, whenever a host gets a DNS servers from DHCP, it adds it in this file.
Dnsmasq needs to redirect all DNS queries to itself. To do that, upon launching, it replaces the nameservers in ‘/etc/resolv.conf’ with 127.0.0.1. Here is how ‘/etc/resolv.conf’ looks like before dnsmasq starts:
$ cat /etc/resolv.conf # Generated by resolvconf domain local.netbeez.net search local.netbeez.net attlocal.net nameserver 8.8.8.8 nameserver 192.168.1.254 nameserver 2600:1700:65a0:8fa0::1
And here is how it looks like after dnsmasq starts:
$ cat /etc/resolv.conf # Generated by resolvconf domain local.netbeez.net search local.netbeez.net attlocal.net nameserver 127.0.0.1
By default, dnsmasq saves the original resolv.conf file in ‘/run/dnsmasq/resolv.conf’. If you stop it with ‘sudo systemctl stop dnsmasq’, it restores the original resolv.conf file.
If you are only looking for DNS caching on your Linux host, this utility requires zero set up and configuration after installation. In addition, it’s lightweight, well supported, and documented.
