I have a couple of Windows laptops, a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu, and an x86 box also running Ubuntu. Using DHCP reservation on my WiFi router (Apple Airport) I have given them all static IP addresses. Then on each machine I edited the hosts file and entered the names and IP addresses of all machines.
I would like to improve that last part. I would like to run a DNS service on my Raspberry Pi so that I can avoid manually editing and updating the hosts file on each machine. I want to do it in such a way that if my home DNS service is down I can still access the Internet for web browsing etc. In other words, if my Raspberry Pi goes down it should not take my home internet with it. I also don't want to have to configure each PC to point it to the Raspberry Pi as the DNS service.
So basically I want to run a DNS service on my Raspberry Pi, such that if the Pi is up all Windows PCs and other Ubuntu boxes discover the DNS service and use it for resolving local names, and if the Pi is down, the only thing that won't work is local name resolution.
This seems like a need a lot of people would have, so hopefully someone has invented something to solve this problem.