There are many DNS names options. Which one do you use?
I just bought an actual domain and use that 😅
As an added bonus, letsencrypt works with no effort.
same. saved my ass already a few times when doing some reverseengineering voodoo. being able to set a valid https cert makes it easier to redirect apps than to bypass forced HTTPS. had to pretend to be a update server for something once and patching the URL was enough via getting a cert quickly (using DNS-01 challenge, no exposed ports ever)
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.
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…
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.
@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.
@sifrmoja
Ah, yep. Now that you say it. Thanks for cluing me in.
@redcalcium @zephyr
I can vouch for the fact that .local stopped working suddenly in most browsers a year or two ago, I was forced to migrate to .internal
There actually is a correct awnser: home.arpa
See https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/homenet-domain-name.htmlYou 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…
*.internal.domain.namesince ssl certs are easier to get when you’re using an owned domain name.I use a subdomain of a domain name I own.
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.
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.
Yes, it does look stupid. I’d rather .lan just be reserved for private networks.
i use my external zone name but have an internal view of the zone inside my lan so records point to local ips.
Split Horizon DNS is the most seamless user experience.
I use subdomains, i.<external domain>, w.<ext> for wifi, few others for vms and containers.
With wireguard everything just works, and wireguard overhead over wireless is negligible even on wifi6.
I agree on WireGuard. It’s clearly the winner in terms of speed for point to point VPN.
Do you use NAT reflection to avoid issues with mobile devices caching the external IP address?
I’ve never experienced any issues so far, the devices should be flushing the cache on network change in theory.
Ah that’s a really good point. I will have to Google this so I can learn how it is done in iptables because I’ve only ever done it with pf on OpenBSD.
I use either .home or an actual domain that I own (makes it easy for https certs and not having to go out of the network and back in)
I use
home.arpafor all my LAN hosts.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
serverhostname.vlan.local.lan
local.lan is the only fixed part of my fqdn’s
I use different ones. Got an legit dpmain which I also use locally (with ssl certificates) and in my local network my server listens to SERVI. Just SERVI.