DNS Resolution Issue Caused By NetBird

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you use NetBird as VPN solution and occasionally encounter DNS resolution issue, this topic could help.

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I’ve been using NetBird to access my homelab for a while. There are few reasons I chose it:

Sovereignty - I can deploy and gain control over all components.
Run Out-Of-Box - NetBird provides good web-based GUI to manage clients and certs. I can control everything through the well-designed web interface without having to interact with config files and CLIs
Custom DNS - To provide HTTPs/TLS to my homelab services, I want to bind public domains map to service IPs. However, DNS providers like CloudFlare restrict DNS rebinding to public domains and private IPs. Therefore, an alternative approach is binding private IPs to private DNS records, and mapping them to public DNS records via CNAME. This approach requires VPN solutions to support custom private DNS. Though some people might compelely rely on private DNS and private IP, that means they need to manage certificates by themselves as generally modern SSL issuers like Let’s Encrypt require DNS validation, where public domains are necessary (especially for free solutions).

Other VPN solutions also support some features above like ZeroTier and TailScale, but their control plane are basically non-open-sourced and cannot be self-hosted.

Netbird on Hallblazzar: Dev Journal

DNS Resolution Issue Caused By NetBird

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