Unifi Remote Worker VPN and Dynamic DNS

[Tech Savvy]

Hi all,

I have a small client that manages properties in the sporting venue industry. They have 4 employees. They used to have an office, but since COVID hit, the sports venues revenue stopped completely. They got out of their lease and hired me to migrate their equipment (a server and a few computers) to the managers home office (in her basement)

Needless to say they are on a tight budget. They already bought a second ISP modem (not service, just the modem). So I went in and installed a dream machine and unifi switch and hardwired all of the equipment.

They already had a domain with google that they use for their website, so I added a dynamic dns entry on google domains, and took the username and password and set it up on dream machine... in googles console I see the correct WAN address however, when I do a DNS lookup it says “DNS Record not found”

However, when I use googles public dns tool (dns.google.com) I get a response.

I can remote vpn in just fine via IP, but no computers or phones can resolve the sub domain vpn.theirdomainname.com

I waited over 24 hours and still no dice.

Any ideas?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

There's a few posts in the UI forums about this, what to plug into the Unifi controller. Select dyndns for service, and in the server field, put "domains.google.com". I haven't tried it, we always to statics, and I tend to avoid using UI's VPN..as much as I love UI products, their VPN isn't too solid.

 

[Tech Savvy]

There's a few posts in the UI forums about this, what to plug into the Unifi controller. Select dyndns for service, and in the server field, put "domains.google.com". I haven't tried it, we always to statics, and I tend to avoid using UI's VPN..as much as I love UI products, their VPN isn't too solid.

That’s how I have it configured, but I actually don’t think UI is the problem. I think it’s the google domains because I can see in the google domains portal that the unifi reported the correct WAN IP. I offered to set them up on a static, but since it’s a residential ISP, they would need to jump $100/mo which el cheapos didn’t want lol


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Markverhyden]

I know I'm stating the obvious but the DNS record is not being published. I've only ever used ZoneEdit for ddns but have never had an issue publishing changes, usually working within 15 minutes. When I'm confirming a domain the two main tools I use are ping and whois.

 

[Tech Savvy]

Found the problem and boy do I feel like a dingbat.

Google domains was the registrar, the host was cloudflare, so the domains name servers were overwritten from googles to the web host... google was creating the records, but since it wasn’t the name server the record was never used.

The records needed to be created on the web hosts side. *face palm*