Hacker News Reader

Comment by pedrocx486 | Hacker News Reader

>- If you go around memorising addresses then you are doing IT wrong in general.

Because I'll surely have an TLD for my local nginx and for my home router...

This is easily solved with mDNS/Avahi. I had the same gripe years ago, now my hosts advertise their own records or even on behalf of others without running a NS.

Just use home.arpa from https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8375 with a custom DNS server or host file. Or one of the many dynamic DNS systems.

Sure, because a custom DNS server is easy to set up.

It's actually pretty easy. I was able to set one up when I was a teenager, almost 25 years ago, in the early days of the commercial Internet. It is even simpler now.

Yes, it is.

Depends on your skill set. If you're ok with *nix, then PowerDNS is pretty simple to work with:

https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns

It's also fairly complete, used in production by some pretty big ISPs.

For a light weight approach instead, Dnsmasq is good:

http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

It's what most home routers (and lots of other stuff) embed. :)

Ok, fair enough. It’s fairly simple to set up.

It’s just a bit of a pain to maintain if the only thing you care about is connecting to server nr 192.168.0.x

I could certainly do it, but there’s 5 services in my house I’d care to connect to, and remembering 1-5 is just as easy as giving them all names. The marginal gains are very low.

Oh, I very much agree. For very small local networks in a flat address space, manually remembering stuff works ok.

Personally I tend to throw the more stable IP addresses in /etc/hosts, as that's simple too. :)

Ever heard of dnsmasq? Comes with many home routers. Puts a dns entry for each host that gets it's ip address via dhcp, plus your static mappings.

.local?

Using .local in DNS is a violation of RFC6762. You really ought not to do this.

It's also too long for something you type a lot. I use .hm.

You can buy a DNS domain for a few quid per year or you can use a dynamic DNS service such as freeDNS for err free.

If you go around exposing services on the internet then you should know how to do it properly. If you can get a name on it then you can put a SSL certificate on it (cheers Lets Encrypt).

If you have a SSL cert on it then you can be fairly sure you are talking to your gear and not a MitM if you take other precautions.

I absolutely do have a LE SSL cert for my home router and all my home web sites. pfSense has a ACME and dynamic DNS client for many services and HA Proxy built in. What more could you want!

With IPv4 you don't HAVE to buy a domain for your local network. You can do just fine with IP addresses. With IPv6, you probably will need to just to make it sane. That adds a whole new step, and a complex one that most people (general public) won't know how to do.

To be fair, most of the general public doesn't know what an ip address is.

I'm in the group that you're speaking of—I have a personal server set up that I can log into remotely, but the prospect of setting up a domain and TLS is very daunting. But, I don't think people like me are all that common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com