| Dnsmasq is small utility designed to provide DNS (domain name) services to a small network connected to the internet via a NAT (network address translation, AKA ip-masquerade) firewall and a modem connection. Since a NAT firewall will pass DNS queries it's perfectly possible for all the machines on such a network to be configured to talk directly to the ISP's name server, but doing that has problems such as long timeouts when not connected to the ISP. Dnsmasq provides a better solution which solves the problems. |