Although local is OK, this article makes the case that home.arpa should be the default. This post touches on it, but doesn’t make a big deal of it.
This is a relatively new standard, made in 2018, so many may not have heard of it.
I think home.arpa should be the default for the local domain zone for both dnsmasq and kresd instead of local.
I intend this topic to be informative, but also to ask if I should create a ticket for it in Github as perhaps a feature request?
The current one is not .local (which belongs to mDNS and not DNS) but .lan.
Also note that you can choose the suffix arbitrarily in (re)Foris.
Yep, but I’m interested in making people aware that the default might not be the best practice.
I’d forgotten that .lan was the default. However, the article states
Do not use undelegated domain names like
.lan,.home,.homenet,.homegroup,.network, nor should you make up your own domain name.
I’m just thinking that folks should be aware of this and perhaps .lan shouldn’t be the default any more.
this is one of those cases where ‘white papers’ are stranger than fiction…
providing that the TLD is relatively safe from outside resolution and uses a common sense name I say ignore best practice on this one…
both .local and .lan seem sane to me… probably leaning slightly towards the former…
I wasn’t near the decision when .lan was chosen. As I see it, it’s quite OK. It’s really short and descriptive.
The only risk I see is ICANN allowing the .lan TLD to start existing globally, but to me that seems quite unlikely, given that they have processes meant to avoid these (and other) risks. In the beginning the new TLD would surely not hold any really important content anyway (especially on names clashing with real host-names in people’s networks), and we could just take action once we know about this happening (soon).
Changing the default also has costs for users, so I’m not really convinced co far. And I can’t say I really like home.arpa. (“aesthetically”)
One interesting option is to choose a global name that you control (instead of .lan). I’d especially consider it for resources where it makes potentially sense (in future) to access them also from a different network (e.g. from your mobile devices located sometimes away).
I use .lan but I’m pretty sure I tried home.arpa and things broke.
Oh right, that name won’t work without further settings/changes.
Fact is, it isn’t a ‘whitepaper’, it has an IETF RFC behind it.
Now the remainder of your ‘common sense’ post touched a nerve, especially with regards to ‘.local’. Speak to those who a few years ago had to go through an AD domain rename cos they followed MS ‘common sense’ which then ended up clashing with Apple MDNS ‘common sense’.
sounds like a royal pita, point taken
Well, “home.arpa” seems to imply home usage, which isn’t necessarily the case.
This article is kinda misinformed though.
DHCP–DNS resolution is complex to get working right if your network equipment even supports it.
OpenWRT (well, dnsmasq really) does this by default, out of the box…
If you use a made-up domain name, then DNS requests may go unfulfilled by your router and it forwards them to the global DNS root servers. This creates needless overhead for the core internet infrastructure, and leaks information about your network (such as device names).
That can also be stopped by a single setting in OpenWRT. And not that many people point their router directly at root name servers, they’d use a caching name server.
That article seems to be more of a “X brand of router does Y wrong, therefore I’ll generalize that to all networks”.