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How to make Android use remote DNS servers over VPN?

4 votes
2 answers
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I've set up an L2TP/IPsec PSK VPN between my phone and my home network. It works, but Android doesn't use my home DNS server, so none of my internal hostnames resolve. I can access internal servers by IP address, but not by name. How can I get the phone to use my internal DNS instead of whatever servers it normally uses? Some background: I'm using a Samsung Epic 4G running Gingerbread. My VPN server is running xl2tpd and openswan on Linux. I checked the routing table on my phone, and traffic is correctly being routed through the VPN. On the server, there are options in the PPP config called "ms-dns-1" and "ms-dns-2" that allows the server to push DNS server IPs to the client. But apparently those options are only used by Microsoft clients. I've Googled the issue, and other people have the same problem, but I haven't been able to find a solution. My phone isn't rooted. I'm willing to root the phone if I have to, but I'd prefer not to. **Edit, 2 months later** I finally found out what was wrong, and it had nothing to do with DNS. I'm using my desktop computer as the VPN endpoint, and I had neglected to turn on IP forwarding, so it wasn't forwarding packets. I could access services on the VPN endpoint itself, but anything that required forwarding packets (including DNS lookups) failed. The VPN client *was* correctly picking up DNS information, but it couldn't reach the DNS server because of the forwarding issue. Once I corrected that, the VPN worked perfectly. To summarize, I'm an idiot.
Asked by Jonathan (141 rep)
Mar 15, 2012, 01:33 PM
Last activity: Aug 22, 2023, 02:26 PM