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Comment by tristanb | Hacker News Reader

Does this have any mdns reflection?

Is that what is required so I can do my server.local and have it work? I’ve struggled a lot of .local stuff with various routers and port openings etc. I know that .local isn’t a standard or something and I’m meant to use something else. I’ve never known what to google to fix it though

.local is a standard. Its a part of mDNS (multicast DNS). Dont use it for your own DNS records.

I'm not sure what exact issue you are having, but if you are trying to resolve mDNS .local across internal networks then you need to look up mDNS reflection. If you are trying to use .local for your own DNS records then pick something else (ideally using an actual registered TLD, so e.g. if you own foo.com then you could use lan.foo.com for your internal records).

I ran into this issue a few months ago when I got sometime to actually setup my home server and wanted to use urls like nas.local and homeassistant.local on my home network to make things easy for my family to access.

Worked fine on windows but all the Apple devices in the house had a conniption when trying to connect. I ended up just using my personal domain replacing .local. Am currently investigating a wildecard DNS SSL cert to get HTTPS working on the LAN, but that's more out of curiosity than anything else

Why bother with the .local suffix? Just do the device's DNS name itself. http://servername/ should work fine, clients register themselves during the DHCP handshake and the router's DNS server records the name.

Not always, and in many cases the OS is actually adding .local or .[your domain] automatically

Which OS? My home network works perfectly fine this way and I have or had Windows, Linux, BSD, and Mac.

> clients register themselves during the DHCP handshake and the router's DNS server records the name.

This is not always true as it’s a feature of the specific router and not part of the spec. To be fair, it’s a feature that’s now fairly common because of how handy it is.

Additionally; many flavours and types of operating systems transparently handle local discovery and resolution just not all of them.

For anyone looking to test this, open a terminal and ping the short domain. In the response it will show what domain it actually used. In my case ‘ping proxmox’ shows ‘proxmox.<my personal domain>.com’.

This is entirely pedantic but I think interesting if you have a mind for optimizing: The discovery/search does introduce some delay.

That’s very dependent of your home network setup. Many consumer grade routers use dnsmasq behind the scenes which handles that for you by default. Once you get out of the consumer grade aio routers it’s much less likely to work out of the box.

What should you use for internal records if you don't own a domain?

.loc instead of .local government is fine

But that TLD isn't reserved, so couldn't someone register it as a real gTLD tomorrow?

You can use anything that’s not already a domain (and unlikely to be one created by someone else).

josephcsibleinternaldomain.com as a spitball

.internal

I've seen .test used in some guides

home.arpa

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8375

One can also use one of the three .home .corp or .mail as of [0]. I'm not aware of an RFC that writes down that those are OK to use, but if the iCANN already pinky sweared that this is OK, what could go wrong?

[0] https://www.icann.org/resources/board-material/resolutions-2...

.home.arpa is meant for this. It's supposed never resolve to any internet address so even if a DNS query ends up outside your network (like if an application handles DNS itself) it won't resolve to an internet address and send data there.

You can add .home.arpa to you DNS search path (configurable with DHCP) so you don't have to type it, e.g. if you look up "nas" your computer will try "nas.home.arpa" too.

> .local is a standard. Its a part of mDNS (multicast DNS). Dont use it for your own DNS records.

Hell to the no. They should have camped on less valuable real estate if they wanted it exclusively. I use .local for every host on my local network and I will never stop.

In debian 12 I just change this:

hosts: files resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns

to this:

hosts: files dns resolve [!UNAVAIL=return]

in /etc/nsswitch.conf, and everything acts just fine.

> ideally using an actual registered TLD

wat

It's so convenient having a standard for mDNS, though. If someone brings a laptop or tablet or something it won't just work on your network.

Why do you even care what your local domain is? Set your search path correctly and you never even type it. .home.arpa is arguably a better choice anyway.

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