[Freedombox-discuss] BIND not working, or am I minunderstanding something?

[A. F. Cano]

I have BIND (Domain Name server) enabled.  I have filled in the Comcast
DNS servers in the "Forwarders" field, which is the only configuration item.

For a while I didn't have those forwarders in there, and yet the
configuration of FreedomBox WAN (enp1s0 - dhcp) knew about them and things
were working fine.  Presumably because everything was forwarded to the WAN
interface anyway.

I've had everything configured with /etc/hosts internally but I'm trying to
get away from this much configuration.  Getting tired of changing everything
everywhere every time something changes.

FreedomBox runs on an apu1d4, with 2 local interfaces, statically assigned
(192.168.224.x and 192.168.200.x).

Testing with one machine that has no customized /etc/hosts on the 224 subnet
shows that if I remove the
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/'Wired connection 1'
which I must have set up in the past as "method=manual" Network Manager can't
configure the interface.  If I put it back with the correct IP for the 224
subnet, it can connect and reach the internet but it doesn't know anything
about the internal machines, even though I've put an /etc/hosts in the
FreedomBox and restarted named.  Looks like even though named is running
on the FreedomBox:

bind     2572083  0.1  1.3 402876 53876 ?        Ssl  13:44   0:05 /usr/sbin/named -f -u bind

nothing is told to the internal machines.  Dhcp is also not running on the
FreedomBox.

ping by internal IP works, even from one subnet to the other.

ssh to the FreedomBox works (by IP number).

ssh to a machine on the other subnet (by IP number) doesn't work
(no route to host).  Does this mean that the firewall needs to be opened
between the 2 internal networks?

ping by machine name doesn't work
(ping: <internal hostname> Name or service not known)

ssh by machine name doesn't work
(ssh could not resolve hostname <internal hostname>: Name or service not known)

Actually, I would like not to have to have even the 
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/'Wired connection 1' file.  Isn't the
purpose of network manager to assign the proper IP address automatically when
connecting to different networks? If I plug the machine into the 224 subnet
it should get the proper IP assigned, if I plug it into the 200 subnet it
should get an IP from there.  I've looked at dnsmasq and it is possible to
configure it such that a specific machine gets the same IP address every time
but in the case of dnsmasq I think it would require one instance to run with a
different configuration file for each interface and I don't think the
FreedomBox can do that.

Does BIND (Domain Name Server) require manual configuration on the FreedomBox?
Should dhcp or dnsmasq be running?  I've looked over the FreedomBox manual but
found no information about this.  If I've overlooked the relevant part please
point me to the correct chapter/wiki entry/post.

Thank you.

Augustine