On 25 Oct 2023 07:32 +0200, from m...@dorfdsl.de (Marco M.): >> TLD '.lan' works. As best I can tell on the web, it doesn't exist. > > Is it intended for that? > No? > Then don't use it. It can be used in the future for public domains.
Exactly. I see lots of people in this sub-thread arguing for cobbled-together, "it works for me for now and if it breaks I'll just fix it later" style solutions. "home.arpa" is _reserved specifically_ for almost exactly the purpose we're talking about: local (for example residential) use where one does not want to pay for a domain name and/or does not need globally unique names. If you have anyway, or are willing to pay for, a domain name that you can use for the purpose, great; all that power to you. But most home users aren't in that situation. For those people, "home.arpa" is _the official_ answer. It's not something I've made up. There's an RFC, there's a corresponding domain name reservation, it's specifically set up so that it won't break for example DNSSEC, and that RFC is a _PROPOSED STANDARD_ which is pretty much as officially sanctioned as things get on the public Internet. (I think IPv4 has the status of STANDARD.) Just like you shouldn't pick some IP address range at random for your LAN if you want hosts on that LAN to be able to communicate unimpeded with hosts on the Internet, you shouldn't randomly pick a domain name. Using a domain name (or IP address range) which is reserved for examples and documentation likely won't break anything important, but it _will_ cause confusion (as evidenced earlier in this thread). If you go with the domain name home.arpa and an IPv4 subnet sliced out of one of 192.168.0.0/16, 172.12.0.0/12 or 10.0.0.0/8, you can be _almost certain_ that nothing will break because of those choices, now _or_ in the future. None of the other alternatives I've seen proposed in this thread can offer anything like such guarantees. -- Michael Kjörling 🔗 https://michael.kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
