I have been using Unbound as a local DNS cache for a little while now. It’s a fine piece of software and I can only recommend it if you need (or want) to run a DNS on your laptop/device. I think that the latest versions of Ubuntu are configured to use dnsmasq by default, so I guess this is of little interest for you guys.

Why would you use a local DNS cache?

Well, if you are at home, using your router’s DNS you probably do not need to: because the device is already doing the caching for you, and your home network is probably never under a lot of load. However, on the road, while using random joe’s wifi, it does help speed up name resolution.

For example, this request is not cached, and very slow (Mexico’s airport, yay), and took 2.981s to complete:

$ time host cyprio.net
cyprio.net has address 91.121.147.65
(...)
host cyprio.net  0.00s user 0.00s system 4% cpu 2.981 total
$

The next call only takes a fraction of the time as it does not need to connect to a french DNS anymore, or wait for the saturated AP’s cache:

$ time host cyprio.net
cyprio.net has address 91.121.147.65
(...)
host cyprio.net  0.00s user 0.00s system 88% cpu 0.007 total

Having a local DNS also allows a few tricks such as domain blacklisting, custom TLDs, etc. Anyway, my $work laptop is a Macbook Air, usually running Apple’s latest stable version, whatever that is. However, it does not come with Unbound, but the easiest way to remedy that error is to install it with brew:

brew install unbound

I will just point you to this excellent installation guide, rather than copy most of it here.

Catch-all

If your work involves building web things (pages, sites, applications, you name it), you are probably used to configure virtual hosts in Apache or Nginx, and then add another line to /etc/resolv.conf, each time. You know it is a crappy way of doing things. Why not use that little DNS you run locally?

After searching 5 minutes with the Duck, and the Google, I could not find a clear method to configure Unbound for this job. It is really simple though. All you have to do is add a local zone for a custom TLD, for example “dev”, and configure it to always resolve to the loop-back address¹:

server:
    # ... your stuff
    local-zone: "dev." redirect
    local-data: "dev. 10800 IN A 127.0.0.1"

Restart Unbound, and you are all set.

$ host whatever.dev
whatever.dev has address 127.0.0.1
$ host blabla.dev
blabla.dev has address 127.0.0.1

And now, back to waiting for my flight…