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I've got a Netgear N600 WNDR3400 Router at home. Is it possible to create a virtual hostname on my home network and have it forward to specific IP addresses of my choosing?

For instance, I'd like to create a virtual host name like http://router1, and round-robin any connection to that name to a list of designated IPs.

I'm not sure if my router even supports it, my cable company gave it to me for free.

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  • What is the actual model number? N600 is a classification of netgear routers which support 300Mbps on the 2.4Ghz range + 300Mbps on the 5Ghz range. The model will likely start with WNDR, probably WNDR3400 or WNDR3700. That said, I don't believe Netgear's default firmware will support round-robin load balancing. May 16, 2013 at 16:41
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    @SAFX - A Round Robin connection on a single internet connection within a private local network seems sort of pointless. It serves no purpose, you can't generate enough traffic, to make it worth while.
    – Ramhound
    May 16, 2013 at 16:41
  • @SAFX Ramhound is correct on that point as well. You'd want a reverse proxy load balancer, such as nginx to distribute HTTP requests evenly. DNS Round-robin does not distribute requests evenly, it only distributes computers evenly. You need a large volume of client computers for it to actually "balance". May 16, 2013 at 16:43
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    @Ramhound I'm doing this for development purposes and I need to test real-world scenarios locally. DNS round-robin is enough for my objectives. I'm building a messaging app and I need to test middleware forwarding with well-known addresses (virtual ips) between message producers and consumers, so I have my reasons. Can I do simple IP forwarding with my router?
    – SAFX
    May 16, 2013 at 16:49
  • @SAFX - Most routers support port forwarding. Check you router's manual on how to do it.
    – Ramhound
    May 16, 2013 at 16:55

1 Answer 1

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The default Netgear firmware does not support DNS round-robin. Your best bet is to see if you can get DD-WRT up and running on the router as a replacement firmware. It allows much more control and a much greater featureset for many linux-based routers.

Most specifically, it comes with the ability to completely configure the DNS proxy (DNSmasq), and you can use this to set up a round-robin DNS entry for any clients that are using the router as a dns server.


First, turn on DNSMasq under Setup -> Basic Setup

Enable DNSMasq

Then add host-records to DNSMasq's config on Services -> Services

Add Host Records

Here, I've bound chat.test.com to a round robin of 192.168.0.12, 192.168.0.13, and 192.168.0.14.

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  • I updated the answer with what I think you're looking for. May 17, 2013 at 2:28
  • OK, tried this. In your example, does test.com need to be configured as the LAN Domain? My LAN domain is home, so I added host-record host-record=route.home,192.168.1.201:8080, tried w/o domain using host-record=route,192.168.1.201:8080, but neither worked. I added a static DHCP mapping for virtual host route, didn't work. Created new question, please post follow ups there, thx: superuser.com/q/596544/171942
    – SAFX
    May 18, 2013 at 2:09
  • It doesn't really matter what the LAN domain is, DNSMasq will let you override any domain: host-record=google.com,192.168.0.13 should work just fine. You can test the results with nslookup chat.test.com <routerip>. I imagine yours didn't work because you added :8080 - There is no port involved with this, it's just DNS. All ports will be redirected. May 20, 2013 at 14:18

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