Hub2 DNS settings.

[#1]

In my Hub Two manager/My Network/IPV4 configuration I have switched "Auto" off and specified 9.9.9.9 primary and 1.1.1.1 secondary. Looking at advanced broadband/internet status where there is no option to change settings as far as I can see, it still shows my DNS servers as  212.159.6.9 and 212.159.13.49 after a restart. The changes I made to IPV4 config remain as above.

This stems from a recent DNS outage at PlusNet towers when I reinstated my connection very quickly by making the change from auto DNS but the router manager seems confusing.What DNS servers am I using, what am I missing/misunderstanding?

[#2]

The manual DNS entries will apply only to any DHCP clients which previously would have been given the hub2's IP as the DNS host.
That's better than nothing, but AFAIK there is no option to override the WAN DNS on that router.

[#3]

Looking into this a little deeper.

My PC is connected to the router on 5GHz wifi. In the wifi adapter's network properties it tells me that for DNS 9.9.9.9 & 1.1.1.1 are used. I connected the PC's to my lan by selecting the SSID and providing the password. Apart from that I've never entered any info on the PC so that DNS info must have come from the router.

It's just idle curiosity really and me trying to understand a little better about what is going on. I find the information displayed in the Hub Two manager confusing.

[#4]

Funnily enough, I did EXACTLY the same as you, for the same reason: in the "IPV4 configuration" page, I turned the auto-DNS server off, and put in a couple of others.

From a practical perspective, anyone receiving a DHCP config will now start to use those external DNS servers, rather than using the router as a "relay"... and the DNS now works for them! Of course, if you have a device that you MANUALLY set up, then you'll need to manually update the DNS for them, to point to those public IPs, rather than use your router.

The DNS IP's that you see on the "Broadband Status" page are the (maybe not working!!!) ones it gets told about (along with it's WAN IP) when it connects to the broadband: any DNS requests sent to the router will be forwarded by the router to those (maybe not working!!!) Plusnet DNS servers, and there seems to be NOTHING you can do to change that.

So, I would say that you've done the best you can!

[#5]

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@longedge wrote:

In my Hub Two manager/My Network/IPV4 configuration I have switched "Auto" off and specified 9.9.9.9 primary and 1.1.1.1 secondary. Looking at advanced broadband/internet status where there is no option to change settings as far as I can see, it still shows my DNS servers as  212.159.6.9 and 212.159.13.49 after a restart. The changes I made to IPV4 config remain as above.

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If you've turned Auto off and set your own DNS servers they will be used, the PN DNS servers will show as you've seen.

It's purely a display thing and nothing you can do.

[#6]

This question still isn't completely answered.

So far all that's been determined is what the LAN client devices DNS's get set to from a router DHCP configuration request to assign the client's LAN address + DNS addresses.

If the router's DNS addresses have been manually entered (i.e. not Auto), and a LAN client device has it's DNS address set to 192.168.1.254 (i.e. fetching DNS responses from the router),  what DNS does the router use to do the lookup ? - does it use the Plusnet "Auto" addresses (e.g. 212.159.6.9 and 212.159.13.49) or does it use the manually overridden addresses (e.g. 1.1.1.1 and 9.9.9.9) ? - bearing in mind that it is the "Auto" DNS addresses being displayed in the router's GUI.

It would be useful to know this, for anyone wanting to use the Plusnet Hub-2 as a caching DNS forwarder to improve LAN responsiveness, given that LAN devices with DHCP assigned external DNS addresses are likely to not have the DNS responses cached by most client devices (except some full featured laptop/desktop web browsers).

[#7]

1) A device picking up a DHCP address and DNS settings will ignore the router, and send the DNS requests directly to the DNS server that is defined on the DHCP page

2) Any device using a static address will use the DNS server defined in their config:

a) if the config points to, say, 9.9.9.9, then like above, they will ignore the router, and get their DNS resolved directly by 9.9.9.9

b) if the device DNS config points to the router, then they will send their DNS request to the router. In turn, the router will use the learned Plusnet DNS servers (as on the Broadband Status page) to do the DNS lookup, passing the response back to the original client device. If those Plusnet DNS servers are dead... tough! (as we already know!)

The DNS setting on the DHCP page only affects the DHCP data sent to DHCP configured clients, telling them which DNS server etc to use.