DNS Server

For anything to work at all, the WinGate machine itself must have a working DNS setup. For the rest of your LAN, that will be accessing the Internet through WinGate, you have the option of setting it up or not. Qbik recommend using the WinGate DNS server as it integrates with the WinGate DHCP Server to provide machine name lookup.

The following are the main reasons why you may want to set up DNS on your LAN:

1. You want to use SOCKS4 to access FTP or Gopher or HTTPS URLs in a browser

2. You want to run some other SOCKS4 capable software

3. You have a large LAN and you want name resolution for the machines on your LAN

4. You want to be able to refer to 'wingate' in your client setup

None of the proxies in WinGate other than SOCKS require DNS to be working on the machines on your LAN.

One of the quirks of the SOCKS4 protocol (fixed in SOCKS5) is that a request for a connection is made in the form of a request for connection to an IP number. This means that a SOCKS4 client needs to be able to look up addresses in order to supply this IP number to the SOCKS4 server.

For this reason, the DNS server was added to WinGate. If you already have DNS on your internal network, and it has sufficient scope to resolve all the names you wish to connect to, then you will not need to run the DNS server in order to use the SOCKS server. You should not enable the DNS server in WinGate if you are already running a DNS server on the same machine - this will mess up your DNS server.

See:

Adding a DNS Server

DNS Options