Internally routing domain traffic

[Rogair]

Is there a way at the Meraki appliance level to internally route traffic for a given domain. 

eg. someone inside my network requests domain.com  that traffic then gets routed to a machine inside the network. I already have domain.com from outside the network routing to the server. Unfortunately internal traffic ends up needing to go out, then back into our network. So if our WAN connection is down we still can't reach the internal servers by domain name. Traffic is also slower due to this. We can by IP, or if I set up a hosts file on each machine, but I'd like to do it at the appliance level. 

[rhbirkelund]

Unfortunately, no.

For this to work you either have to manually add the domain entry to each device's hosts file, or use some locally hosted domain services, like pihole, infoblox etc. There you can create local DNS entries, for local servers.

[cmr]

If you run your own DNS servers (as most enterprises do) then you can do this, but beware that you need to replicate all DNS entries for the domain in question, not just the one host that you want to use direct internal routing.  Linux and Windows servers both include DNS server modules.

[Aquatoes]

Blows my mind that Meraki still does not have this feature. We are seeing a massive increase in clients shifting away from Servers and using Azure AD for authentication. So for us most of our Meraki clients about 95% don't even have a physical server and putting a server or a Linux device onsite just for a few hostname directories is ridiculous. Fortigate and Sonicwall both support local domain traffic why has Meraki not added this feature yet?

[Arthamon]

I definitely agree with @Aquatoes , in this case I would encourage everyone to use the "Make a Wish" feature to add this to the requested features list.

https://documentation.meraki.com/General_Administration/Other_Topics/Give_your_feedback_(previously_...

[Aquatoes]

Good post. I have also bumped this in the tech forums on a separate post as well. I have made the wish a few times now over the last couple of years. Original thoughts were that they did not want to roll this out due to wanting to push this as a feature to Umbrella DNS upsell but sadly even Umbrella cannot resolve local hostnames when integrated with MX. This needs to be added and soon as more and more clients are dumping theirs servers in sleugh of Microsoft 365 being able to handle what most businesses needed a server for.

[KennyBlatz]

I’d just create a local DNS record on the appliance so internal clients resolve the domain to the internal server’s IP. That way traffic stays inside without extra routing rules.

[rhbirkelund]

The idea is good, but as of today it's a bit of a hassle, and the risk for unexpected behaviour is high. 

DNS entries on the appliance are not reflected in the Dashboard, but only available through the API. So one would need to have clear documentation on what has been done to the DNS entries on the appliance, and always have that in mind. 

https://documentation.meraki.com/SASE_and_SD-WAN/MX/Operate_and_Maintain/How-Tos/Local_DNS_Service_o...

What's to happen in the future, who knows. Hopefully this will be added to the Dashboard, for better management.