Basic intranet setup

[Chris Buxton]

I don't see it as bad practice. This is just my personal opinion, but  
for the risks you cite:

* ICANN is unlikely to approve a ".lan" TLD.

* This risk is similar to the risk of overlapping non-routable IP  
space, such as both organizations using 10/8. It happens, and people  
deal with it. Using "org1.lan" and "org2.lan" in the two structures  
leads to an unlikely overlap, anyway - just don't use "lan" itself as  
your local domain.

* This value can be set by DHCP for the vast majority of hosts.

However, there's nothing wrong with creating a subdomain of the  
public domain name. There may be advantages to this approach in a  
given environment, such as a simpler AD structure or simpler  
configuration of the default search list on Windows.

BTW: There is a TLD reserved for local use. It's .local. However,  
some operating systems have co-opted this name for use by zeroconf  
and mDNS, making it difficult to successfully use .local as a DNS TLD.

Chris Buxton
Men & Mice

On Aug 6, 2007, at 1:26 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 03:15:42PM -0700,
>  Chris Buxton <cbuxton at menandmice.com> wrote
>  a message of 36 lines which said:
>
>> with names like "wiki.privatedomain.lan",
>> "issues.privatedomain.lan", etc.
>
> I thought it was widely regarded as "bad practice" to have a dummy TLD
> (like ".lan" in your example). Because, if either:
>
> * ICANN creates a TLD with the same name, or,
>
> * you buy or merge with another organization which does the same (they
> can, there are no reserved TLD for local use),
>
> it will be quite hard to go to every machine and change the value!
>
> It seems that the recommended practice is to create a subdomain of
> your real domain like local.menandmice.com?
>
>