US Telco Support > Verizon > Verizon Fiber Optics > MI424WR-GEN2 and DHCP

MI424WR-GEN2 and DHCP

The Actiontec will always hand out its own IP address to the clients on your network as the DNS server. This allows it to handle name resolution of local computers/devices on your network, as well as forwarding external DNS requests on to the DNS servers that you specify.

So there isn't a way to configure dhcp to specify dns - even though the settings are there?
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»www.devicemanager.net

What he means is after the actiontec checks its local dns it will forward to the 2 dns entries you specified. So you should be fine.

well something weird is happening. i made a virtual computer and when i ping it by name, it resolves to an ip address outside of my network. 199.101.28.20 - seems to be some dns assist for verizon, how could that be?
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»www.devicemanager.net

reply to devicemanage
If you set up your router to use VZ's default DNS addresses, and you try to resolve an unknown address, you end up on VZ search.dnsassist system.

So, what to do? Here are your non-exotic options.

1. Allow VZ to provide their default addresses through WAN DHCP. You'll get dns assistance.
2. Determine what those addresses are, then manually set the router to the same ones, except change the last octet from .12 to .14 to opt out of the dns assistance.
3. Use DNSBench to evaluate relative performance of other DNS servers, then manually set the addresses in the router.
4. Bypass the router by setting the DNS address on the PC directly, perhaps from the results of your performance testing.

DNSBench »www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

Another more exotic option is to set up a caching DNS server on your local network, but that's just slightly more complicated. And you can find other solutions. Your choice depends on what you want your network to do.

Generally, I let the router do the work. I alternate between options 2 and 3 (currently 3), depending on browser performance. When the PC gets its local address through LAN DHCP, unless you specify otherwise, the PC uses the router as its DNS source.

It's been a while since I used an Actiontec as primary router so I can't say how it compares in this aspect. But running dd-wrt on Asus hardware gives me excellent caching performance using addresses selected from DNSBench. Gibson's warning against using the router as single DNS source for my LAN is deliberately ignored.

I hear ya, but I have my own dns server that I want to use and would just like for the actiontech dns server to hand out my dns specifications.
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»www.devicemanager.net

Just put in the Actiontech router the IP address on your local network of the DNS server