Although I had been running Unbound for DNS alongside some other services on the raspberry pi for quite some time I had found it to be rather unreliable. I’m not sure if my raspberry pi was simply faulty or whether something else was the cause but it started to drop off the network rather regularly.

The other issue I had been having was that my ISP’s router, while allowing a custom DHCP range, would not allow the changing of DNS servers and made reservations very difficult to create.

This meant that I had to statically assign the DNS server to my machines and that became a bit tedious. As I now had a hypervisor I decided I may as well move Unbound to a new VM and add DCHP as well.

Moving unbound was rather easy. After creating a VM in proxmox I simply installed Archlinux, did my usual configuration changes, installed Unbound and then rsynced my unbound configs over from the raspberry pi. Rather than change the DNS entries on all my machines I removed the raspberry pi from the network and changed the IP of the VM to the one the raspberry pi was previously using.

At this point I had reliable DNS but what about DHCP. After some googling I decided that I didn’t really need anything fancy and DHCPD would do the job. I mainly followed the Archwiki for configuration instructions but also added the following line to allow for a search domain.

option domain-name "mysite.mydomain.com";

This allows me to just put in the hostname of any of my machines that are in DNS rather than the FQDN when using putty or a web browser.

To do the switchover I simply disabled DHCP on the router and enabled DHCPD in the middle of the night to avoid any IP address conflicts. I had also set the lease time on the router to 10 minutes the previous day so that the changes would take effect as soon as possible.

The raspberry pi is now sitting unused but hopefully I’ll find a use for it soon.