basic client setup plus name resolving from HW router

Simon Hobson dhcp at thehobsons.co.uk
Mon May 15 07:10:57 UTC 2006


Sten Carlsen wrote:
>The use of .local is reserved by Apple. If you do not use macs, you
>don't have to care.
>Whatever you do I recommend not to use .local. .home is safe.
>
>This is based on personal experience and documents from Apple. Look for
>rendevous.

Yet it's a bit of a mess really, and something that should have been 
dealt with years ago - after all, people have been using 'private' 
dns spaces for many years, many of them by simply 'making up' any old 
.com domain. If there was some real, hard, "you CAN use x, y, or z 
for a private network" then this issue wouldn't keep coming up.

It's slightly misleading to say that .local is reserved by Apple as 
they are only implementing an existing recommendation - it's a pity 
others have ignored that recommendation. One of the other engineers 
at work tells me that he always sets up customers MS networks (if 
they don't have their own domain name) as .local because that's what 
an MS doc says.


There is a draft document suggesting the reservation of .local for 
link local names and multicast dns : 
http://files.multicastdns.org/draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns.txt

Section 3.2 says :

>Operators setting up private
>    internal networks ("intranets") are advised that their lives may be
>    easier if they avoid using the suffix ".local." in names in their
>    private internal DNS server. Alternative possibilities include:
>
>       .intranet
>       .internal
>       .private
>       .corp
>       .home


There's more about Zeroconf at http://www.zeroconf.org/

Rendevous is no longer used by Apple as a result of an agreement with 
someone else who was already using that name. Apple now officially 
call it Bonjour, though of course there's lots of historical stuff 
that won't get changed.

Simon




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