Local DNS issue with TP Link router

Question

Hi I am having difficulty in using TP-link router (TL-R480T) as local DNS server to serve names of nodes (PCs) in a LAN.

Any suggestion / solution is very much appreciated.

Solution

Per Router TL-R480T manual it has no local DNS capabilities, only DynDNS and of course it resolves all DNS requests by forwarding it to your ISP DNS servers. So for your LAN environment to be able to resolve local DNS you should install a DNS server with a forward lookup to your router or eg Google DNS and set all your LAN client with the newly setup DNS server as first DNS server. Depending on your LAN and Environment Design, you should have your clients register themselves to your local DNS server or you should manually add them.

Another solution would be to edit ALL local PC's hosts files to ensure proper name resolution (meaning you put ALL IPs with corresponding names on ALL PCs).