There are many DNS names options. Which one do you use?
I use a subdomain of a domain name I own.
According to IETF, you should only use
.intranet,.internal,.private,.corp,.homeor.lanfor your private network ( RFC 6762 Appendix G ). Using other TLDs might cause issues in the future, especially since new gTLDs seems to show up every few months or so, which can collide with the TLD you use for your local network.The one reserved for residential usage is
home.arpa.Interesting, so this is the latest recommendation? Which is probably why I haven’t seen it in the wild yet, at least in my circles.
Which means they probably going to
cash outrelease gTLDs for.intranet,.internal,.private,.corp,.homeand.lansoon…
@redcalcium
Really? Not .local? Why is it the default on so much?
@zephyrA long time ago Microsoft and some teaching sources used .local in example documentation for local domains and it stuck. Like contoso.com was Microsoft’s example company. I was taught to use .local decades ago and it took a very long time to unlearn it.
@dpflug @redcalcium @zephyr it is reserved for mDNS.
A problem with the
.lanTLD (maybe others from this list) is that web browsers do not consider it a TLD when you type it in the address bar, and only show you the option to search for that term in your default search engine. You have to explicitly typehttps://before it, to have the option to visit the URL.E.g type
example.comin the address bar -> pressing Enter triggers going tohttps://example.com. Typeexample.lan-> pressing Enter triggers a search forexample.lanusing your default search engine.Little known trick–or perhaps everyone knows it and is quietly laughing behind my back–with Chromium browsers and Firefox (and maybe Safari, I’m not sure), you can add a slash to the end of an address and it will bypass the search.
So, for example, my router on the LAN goes by the hostname “pfsense”. I can then type pfsense.lan/ into my address bar and it will bring me to the web UI, no HTTP/s needed.
You can throw a
/after to force it to recognize as a URL too.
I just bought an actual domain and use that 😅
As an added bonus, letsencrypt works with no effort.
Same here. Well worth it for $10 a year
I bought domain from joker.com, 10 years for $33
What? How they sell for so long?
I don’t know but they do. I picked the cheapest name I could find and went with it.
Checked and they still do sell domains for 10y but price has gone up.
You shouldn’t use .local for your manually defined local domain names if you plan to ever use mdns/avahi/bonjour/zeroconf.
And
.boxhas been registered as a generic TLD now, so you could run into external .box domains.Hopefully AVM gets to register
fritz.boxthen, because they’ve been setting up their customers with that as their internal domain for ages…
There actually is a correct awnser: home.arpa
See https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/homenet-domain-name.htmlI use
home.arpafor all my LAN hosts.*.internal.domain.namesince ssl certs are easier to get when you’re using an owned domain name.For local DNS
home.arpais I think what we’re ‘supposed’ to use, but I use .lanOnly use another domain name if you actually have it registered, like
myname.netor something. As a bonus you can then get a wildcard letsencrypt SSL cert for easy HTTPS.Why should you only use ones you own, even if it’s just local network?
Because of interference with existing domains. Say you set a computer on your network to
mypc.google.com, that won’t work because the DNS server will lookup google.com as an external domain.
fritz.box for the machines themselves because Fritz!BOX (although handed out by Pi-Hole),but .lan for anything going over the local proxy towards the same machine for TLS.
Some machines use my custom domain name instead of .lan, if they need to be accessible from outside. So these last ones go directly over the local proxy internally, but automatically over CloudFlare Tunnel and Authentik when not at home. The proxy being Caddy.
my server is just
serverI tend to use .local
That will work fine so long as you don’t need services like Avahi and mDNS.
hostname.vlan.local.lan
local.lan is the only fixed part of my fqdn’s
.home.lan for me.
I use .lan for everything the router can resolve names for, and .local for Avahi mDNS 😈
There’s a draft rfc that defines “.home.arpa” as an internal. It looks stupid and totally misses the point, but works.
Yeah, but it’s a proposal, so not really better that .lan.
