Pfsense DNS registration

ThomasG · October 24, 2020, 4:50pm

Hallo community,

Pfsense is my DHCP and DNS Server. There are 4 clients in my network with the following network setup.

Kali VM (DHCP)
Windows 10 Laptop (DHCP)
Windows 10 VM (DHCP reservation)
Windows Server 2012 R2 (static IP)

From the Kali VM I can ping the windows 10 VM and the lapto hostname or the FQDN but I can’t ping the Windows Server. Pinging the IP address directly works.
Error message: ping: server.at.internal: Name or service not know

I checked all network setting I am aware of on Windows Server but pfsense just doesn’t recognize the hostname.

As a workaround I also changed the server to DHCP reservation in pfsense but I am curious if it is possible to set it up without a reservation. What settings do I need to get a static IP registered in DNS?

pavlos · October 24, 2020, 9:30pm

Services | DNS Resolver | General Settings

Static DHCP
click Register DHCP Static mappings

ThomasG · October 25, 2020, 7:30am

This is selected and works. That is my “workaround”.

But my question is how does a computer register it hostname in pfsense when the network settings are set to static IP (on the computer itself).

FCifelli · October 29, 2020, 1:58pm

You mentioned that you have a Windows 2012 server. You probably assign the static IP address on the server rather than using DHCP to assign a static IP address. Keep the server IP settings the way they are, but also assign a DHCP static IP address in pfSense.