Dnsmasq For Linux

Dnsmasq is an open source, completely free, easy to configure and lightweight command-line software designed from the offset to act as a DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server and DNS (Domain Name System) forwarder on GNU/Linux and UNIX-like operating systems.

The software has been engineered in such a way that it provides DNS, as well as DHCP functionality to a small network. It is capable of serving the names of local machines that aren’t in the global DNS and contains numerous attractive features.

A wide range of command-line options are available for this project, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘dnsmasq --help’ command in a Terminal app. Among these, we can mention the ability to specify a local address to listen on, to specify the size of the cache in entries, as well as to specify a custom configuration file.

Installing Dnsmasq on a GNU/Linux operating system is does the same way as you would do with any other open source program that is distributed as a source archive. First you download the package, save it on your computer (preferably your Home directory), and extract its contents using an archive manager utility.

Then, move to the location where you have extracted the archive file in a terminal emulator (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/dnsmasq-2.72 - replace ‘softpedia’ with your username), run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide.

Dnsmasq supports for multiple operating systems, including Linux (Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, Smoothwall, SUSE, IP-Cop, Firebox, floppyfw, LEAF, CoyoteLinux, Clarkconnect, Freesco, etc.), BSD (FreeBSD), and Mac OS X. It runs on 32-bit and 64-bit computer platforms.