Why do I need DNS?
WinGate will now configure DNS for the client machines via DHCP. This section
is retained for historical reasons
For anything to work at all, the WinGate machine 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.
The following are the main reasons why you may want to set up DNS on your LAN
1. You want to use SOCKS to access FTP or Gopher or HTTPS URLs in a browser.
2. You want to run some other SOCKS capable software
3. You have a large LAN and you want name resolution for the machines on your LAN.
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 SOCKS protocol 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 SOCKS client needs to be able to look up addresses in
order to supply this IP number to the SOCKS 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.
You WILL need to enable the DNS on your LAN however.
If you are using the DNS server in WinGate, you should set the DNS Server
settings for your LAN adapters (on all machines EXCEPT the wingate machine) to be
the IP number of the wingate machine.
There are a lot of very good resources on the Internet, which will help you to
set this all up. In particular, the following page will most likely be able
to help you if you run into difficulties:
http://www.windows95.com/connect/
Also the Qbik New Zealand Web pages will always contain the latest infomation
about Qbik products such as WinGate.
http://www.qbik.com/
Remember that IP numbers have to be unique for machines on the same network?
Well, you can think of the entire Internet as a single network. But your LAN
is probably not on the same network, even if one of the machines (i.e. the
wingate machine) is on the Internet. You see, it is not so much a computer being on
the Internet as a computer interface, whether this be a LAN card or a serial port to your modem. The Internet can
see the interface that is connected, but no further.
This means that you can choose any number you like for the machines on your
LAN. However it isn
The wingate machine can see the entire Internet, and your LAN. So, you don
Fortunately some smart person already thought of this one, and so a whole heap
of addresses have been kept aside for just this purpose. These addresses are
called
Depending on the number of machines on your LAN, you probably will want to use
a c-class (256 interfaces) address range. A good one to use is
192.168.0.*
the corresponding subnet mask will be 255.255.255.0
Anything in the range 192.168.0.x through to 192.168.255.x is usable for these
purposes.
You should set up your LAN using numbers in this range. You should need no
other settings in the TCP/IP setup of your LAN machines, except that on the
wingate machine, you need an entry for DNS server, which will be the IP number given
to you by your service provider. If you have been using the Internet before
getting hold of WinGate, then this will have already been set up for you.
Note
For getting started, you may like to put an entry for the wingate machine in
the
An example may be (if you are using the 192.168.0.* private c-class addresses
on your LAN, which I recommend)
192.168.0.1 wingate
remember you must put an enter at the end of the last line in hosts file, else
it may not be recognised.