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Comment by phs318u | Hacker News Reader

.local ?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

Like the linked wikipedia article says, .local is used by mDNS(zeroconf/bonjour/avahi/etc.), so you might see weird stuff if you use it for a "normal" DNS environment.

AFAICT current "best practice" for private networks is to use a private subdomain of your real domain. Say, .internal.example.com.

Google registered the .dev gTLD for their internal use. So I've been doing the same, hijacking all requests for the .dev gTLD and serving up my own zones.

Google has both .dev and .prod.

That's fine until Google buys your company. :)

I am willing to take that risk. :)

I will not be that sad.

That's why i use sometimes simply .loc.. :)

The annoying part is that Chrome treats valid (g)TLDs differently. If you type test.dev in your browser it will try to resolve test.dev. But if you type test.loc, it will google for test.loc.

There are a lot of workarounds sure, but try explaining that to everyone else.

FYI, some Linux distributions default to .localdomain instead.

But for my machines, I just use a domain that I own.

Unfortunately that is less and less possible due to multicast DNS which hijacked that TLD.

Isn't .private reserved?

Yes, but that just means they can decide to do something special with it in the future, not that you can use it for your own purposes.

It would be great if mDNS was reliable enough that you wouldn't need to hack together a private DNS in most cases.

.local is for mdns only. I've been using .lan instead for locally poisoned DNS entries (in my case, dnsmasq being both DNS server and dhcpd to make it easy).

No, absolutely not. If people choose that for a local domain, that breaks mDNS.

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