I had a similar discussion with another vendor recently while testing their mesh wireless systems. This vendor’s units are actually re-writing dhcp requests that clients make to point DNS to the primary mesh unit. This even happened when the mesh platform was in pure bridge mode (as opposed to router mode). The vendor said this was to make sure their app worked reliably. I’d say this sort of behaviour has quietly become common in the one app to rule it all world.

 

 

 

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+tony=wicks.co.nz@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Anurag Bhatia
Sent: Thursday, 5 November 2020 7:03 am
To: NANOG Mailing List <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: {Disarmed} Re: Asus wifi AP re-writing DNS packets

 

Hello

 

 

An update on this issue: 

 

Going through (long) Asus support channel, they first agreed that this was intentional to make router.asus.com work but did take my request to make that optional. They have issued me a test firmware which so far seems to be working perfectly with no-rewriting rules. Hoping that it doesn't bring any side effects and they eventually put it in their public release after testing.