pfsense: bypassing nat reflection or split dns using windows hosts file

We have a PFSense box, the problem is that it does not resolve WAN Domains on our internal network.

What does this mean?

For example, our Datacenter which is in our home office has a domain for exmple 12345.com; so all of our remote employee (most of them are remote) access all our services using this domains (For Example 12345.com/CRMServer or 12345.com/Accounting etc etc)

The problem comes (ironically) when someone on our home office wants to access this services and they try this same addresses (12345.com/CRMServer or 12345.com/Accounting) but the router is not able to Route this correctly because it does not know how to resolve (I do no know why).

On the PFSense website there are some solutions which I have tried but have not worked for us  (see reference below)

### https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Why_can't_I_access_forwarded_ports_on_my_WAN_IP_from_my_LAN/OPTx_networks ###

The primary solution until know is that we have used the servers IP directly to access it's services (for example instead of 12345.com/CRMServer we use 192.168.1.78/CRMServer (which is the server internal IP)) but this is not an elegant or scalable solution.

We have also tried another 'not elegant' solution which is to modify the Hosts File on each client computer so the DNS redirects correctly.

These are practical solutions but will not solve the main problem. On the meantime our systems work this way, when we find a complete solution we'll post it.

 

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