Chrome seems to bypass local DNS server occasionally

Question

I run my own caching bind server on my local network with a properly configured zone for my local domain 'local.lan'. This bind server happens to be running on an ESXI host inside an Ubuntu 14.04 Server vm.

My network has DHCP setup to deliver the address of my DNS server to DHCP clients, thus ensuring anything connected to my network hits my DNS server first.

This setup has been running for almost a year now and seems to mostly work.

Lately, it seems Chrome somehow bypasses my DNS server on occasion and returns "DNS lookup failed" for any named address on my local network. For example, if I type "http://redmine.local.lan" into Chrome, it will work most of the time, but it will occasionally try to query some internet DNS server which knows nothing of my local.lan domain. I can issue the same request from another desktop with Chrome at the same time and it works just fine. IE and nslookup all seem to work properly; its just Chrome.

I've watched my DNS logs when trying to navigate to a site on my local network. And for the addresses where it fails to DNS lookup, Chrome seems to be issuing a DNS request for 'google.com' instead of 'redmine.local.lan'.

The only fix I've seen work it just letting the tab sit open in Chrome. Eventually it seems to realize "huh, maybe should I should ask the proper DNS server for the address" and it works. Clearing Chrome's internal DNS cache and clearing the OS's DNS cache seem to have very little to no effect.

Any ideas on what may be going on here?

Answer 1

On further inspection, it looks like my ISPs DNS servers were sneaking in as secondary and tertiary name resolvers. Although set to only broadcast my DNS server when fulfilling DHCP requests, it appears my router had other plans. I believe this may be a bug with the Linksys E2000.

Setting the desktops to always use my DNS server instead of relying on DHCP seems to have corrected the issue.