In this article I am going to walk you through the necessary steps to configure your Asus RT-AC66U as a caching dns server using bind. According to Wikipedia – “Caching name servers (DNS caches) store DNS query results for a period of time determined in the configuration (time-to-live) of each domain-name record. DNS caches improve the efficiency of the DNS by reducing DNS traffic across the Internet, and by reducing load on authoritative name-servers, particularly root name-servers. Because they can answer questions more quickly, they also increase the performance of end-user applications that use the DNS. Recursive name servers resolve any query they receive, even if they are not authoritative for the question being asked, by consulting the server or servers that are authoritative for the question. “
As you must already know, the Asus RT-AC66U runs Busybox, which is a very small but powerful embedded Linux distro. Because of this there are a lot of familiar commands available via the CLI. However, don’t get to comfortable, as this is still a very foreign land.
Note that this article assumes that you have ssh or telnet working and can log into your RT-AC66U via the CLI.
Ok first off let me start by saying that this is probably the coolest piece of home computing hardware that I have ever laid my hands on. Yes the setup was easy, and yes the thing is rock solid, and yes wireless range is awesome. But for approx $200 USD you really should not expect anything less. I’m not going to go into its specs or features, as I’ll leave that to the professionals. Read up on it here.
Anyway out of the box it supported telnet, but I wanted ssh, so I dropped the default firmware and went with Asuswrt-Merlin. It was at this point I started to explore the Busybox OS and decided I wanted to monitor the device via my HomeLab Zenoss install.
However, much to my chagrin net-snmp was not installed out of the box.
So how do you install it you ask? Would you believe via a package manager?
First, you need to find the package name
#ipkg list | grep snmp
Then install the snmp package
#ipkg install net-snmp
Then configure it to start at boot time.
#app_set_enabled.sh net-snmp yes
In order to configure it, you are going to have to search for the snmp.conf
#find / -name snmpd.conf
I found two files and one of them clearly states that you should not edit it directly. The other one does not so this is the one that I modified to include my custom rocommunity. See below.
rocommunity lab
Now I just need to figure out how to allow port 161 udp/tcp on my local LAN segment and I am in business. However, I will probably tackle that tomorrow.
Additional Info (2016)
Note, you can restart snmp as shown below.
Stopping:
admin@RT-AC66U:/tmp/home/root# app_stop.sh net-snmp
killall: dm2_transmission-daemon: no process killed
killall: asus_lighttpd: no process killed
killall: dm2_snarfmaster: no process killed
killall: dm2_nzbget: no process killed
killall: dm2_amuled: no process killed
iptables: No chain/target/match by that name
iptables: Bad rule (does a matching rule exist in that chain?)
Starting:
admin@RT-AC66U:/tmp/home/root# app_set_enabled.sh net-snmp yes
The field(Enabled) was set “yes” already.
Restarting the package…
2016 Update – Configuring SNMP via the WebUI
Figured that I would add an update to this post as it seems that there are plenty of folks who are looking to setup SNMP on their Asus routers. Note that SNMP can now be configured directly from the WebUI.
In the left pane, click on “Advanced Setting”. Then click on the “SNMP” tab. See example below. Note that the webui does not seem to pick up your configuration if you have configured it via the cli. I have not tested to see if the WebUI overwrites the CLI configuration or if it creates another configuration file.
