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Comment by gclawes | Hacker News Reader

RFC 8375: Special-Use Domain 'home.arpa.' is supposed to be used for this.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8375/

RFCs were originally formalization of what was being used in practice, home.arpa was chosen apparently for reasons of beauracratic convenience rather than what would best serve existing users, who all would prefer .lan and continue to do so since that was published in 2018

> RFCs were originally formalization of what was being used in practice

You may be confusing it with the IETF’s policy.

In early days of the RFCs, most started out as proposals, often but not always with some existing implementation as a jumping-off point to conversation (hence the name). I no longer remember why they started to be numbered and tracked, as the process naturally preceded that.

You can verify what I say by just reading some old ones at the rfc editor site.

I looked into the actual reasoning here:

- Originally, IETF specified .home, but never went through the process to add it to the list of reserved names.

- Someone applied for the .home gTLD, and while it ultimately didn't go through there was a while while it was up in the air. Due to this the homenet working group had to change gTLDs.

- They decided to switch to .homenet. However, because of DNSSEC, whatever they used would need an insecure delegation in the root zone or validating resolvers wouldn't be able to resolve it. Since IAB controls .arpa but IANNA controls the root and there was no process to ask IANNA for this, they eventually decided to use home.arpa instead.

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/homenet/8cfJkr7SPMaPS4...

RFC 8244 is an interesting read on the topic: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8244/

and most people dont use it because its an incredibly poor name.

Why don't they just put home.arpa or .arpa in their search path?

What, exactly, makes it poor? Be specific.

having two levels, for one. "arpa" not being remotely memorably to non-technical people, for another.

- WTF is arpa? (in reality, I know, but there are better names than an obscure reference to internet prehistory)

- it is a second-level domain, why?

- 9 characters (home.arpa) is a lot

I kind of understand the motivation, it is a "technical" domain since it doesn't represent something in the global DNS registry, so it gets the .arpa TLD. However, that's reasoning that it out of touch from normal users. Normal users don't want to be exposed to the technicalities of DNS when they enter something in the address bar, and "myserver.lan" is more meaningful than "myserver.home.arpa", and giving meaningful names is the whole point of DNS.

It feels like a choice that was made at the end of a very long meeting about much more important topics.

I will be very specific about why it is poor. The specific reason is my home network is not the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The character count. lan is 3 char, home.arpa is 9. Subjectively, tt is also aesthetically unappealing.

I can't fucking _wait_ to type bender.home.arpa instead of bender.lan. Hyped.

Then use search domain and let your DHCP and DHCP6 server hand that out to clients.

or we could just not publicly delegate a defacto private space?

Search domain is handy but it's ambiguous.

> use search domain

I don't know what this means, and searching is thorny. Help?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_domain

Your DHCP/SLAAC RA tells clients "here is a list of search domains, when you attempt to query a bare name, also look for the name plus any suffixes listed in the search domain list". So on a system with "home.arpa" in the search domains, you can do something like 'ping myhost' and your system should attempt to resolve 'myhost.home.arpa'.

Thanks, appreciated. Forgot that wiki is good at this (and TV series ;-)

So now you’re potentially in conflict with ALL gTLDS? I don’t get what this is supposed to accomplish.

It would be awesome if Ubiquity will actually follow this RFC too. The Amplifi product line from Ubiquity have `.lan` support but no `home.arpa`.

[0]: https://amplifi.com/

Ubiquiti aren't the only ones. OpenWrt (and, by extension, GL.iNet) explicitly refuses to forward .lan DNS queries to public resolvers. This is a good thing: "LAN" has a singular, unambiguous meaning that directly contradicts its use as a public TLD. The fact that we're even debating this is outrageous.

Or ICANN could just do the right thing and reserve .lan as well, which is so much more intuitive and memorable.

yeah I'm not going to tell my s/o to use plex.home.arpa. instead of plex.lan

That's nice and all, but OpenWrt (and its use of .lan) predates this particular RFC by a rough 14 years.

I hope the gTLD application gets struck down.

God forbid OpenWrt ever receives an update or something.

If you actually think it's a trivial affair to change a well-established default with more than 20 years of history that is, on top of all other difficulties that such a change typically encompasses, used to identify and name things, I hereby beg you to never design or provide any kind of infrastructure.

You know, just because it's in an RFC doesn't mean it's actually practical. 'home.arpa' is significantly worse than every other option.

An update wouldn't change all the existing configurations.

Internal. is also an valid option. I moved everything there about a year ago

.internal is ICANN and not (yet?) an IETF RFC:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

Other special use domains:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-use_domain_name

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain#Reserved_doma...

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6761

Looking at your links, subjective and legacy considerations aside, .alt per RFC 9476[1] seems as good a choice as .lan.

Personally, I just use a registered domain for this purpose, as they're cheap enough to not care (last I checked, I pay $10–20/domain/year for registrations, depending on registrar and TLD, and $0.21/zone/month for hosting public zones on Google Cloud).

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9476

A registered domain has the added benefit that you can use the same namespace for externally accessible services. I personally do this (using Cloudflare Tunnels, not open ports).

But what if my LAN is in the garage?

well then it's a home for your lan.

But why is it that nowadays, it's enough for a vulture corporation to have enough money to be able to privatize a part of the "web" that is in common usage (in the sense of common good) since so long?

It should be logical even without thinking that the request have to be rejected.

.internal as well I believe

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