SmartDNS VPN and DNS config

[Mike]

Hi,

Has anyone configured their router to use SmartDNS and can give me some help setting up a RUTX50?

I’m really struggling to transpose the setup info on their website to the RUTX Web UI.

Many thanks,

Mike

[AndzejJ]

Hello,

Firstly, it seems that SmartDNS (DNS) is not necessary for SmartDNS VPN. I was able to connect SmartDNS VPN successully without it.

Here are my configurations (using mobile connection, so if you use wired WAN, you can edit the WAN interface):

Network → WAN → Edit Mob1s1a1 → Advanced settings → Custom DNS servers:

Then, OpenVPN configurations are as follows:

Username is your SmartDNS VPN username that can be found in the VPN tab in your account settings on SmartDNS.

The serverlocation.crt and tls.crt was downloaded from here.

List of VPN servers is available here.

As for SmardDNS itself (it is not necessary for VPN), you can download it from the command line (CLI/SSH instructions here, username is ‘root’):

opkg update
opkg install smartdns

Keep in mind that there will be no WebUI section for it. So if you really need it, you will need to configure it from the command line. Instructions can be found here. It seems that there are two ways that you can configure it: DNSMasq (which is install on RUTX50) can forward DNS queries to SmartDNS service that you have installed, or you can use the SmartDNS instead of DNSMasq (I think that forwarding from DNSMasq to SmartDNS should be easier in this case.).

Since the package is not supported by us, you will need to figure it out yourself. However, I think that VPN is enough.

Let me know how it goes.

Kind Regards,

[Mike]

Many thanks for this … I’ll get back to you as I haven’t tried it yet … having to deal with some UPS problems as a priority.

Thank you … Mike