I’ve wanted to install pihole so I can access my machines via DNS, currently I have names for my machines in my /etc/hosts files across some of my machines, but that means that I have to copy the configuration to each machine independently which is not ideal.
I’ve seen some popular options for top-level domain in local environments are *.box or *.local.
I would like to use something more original and just wanted to know what you guys use to give me some ideas.
do not use
.local
, as tempting as it may beuse
.home
personally“.home.arpa” for A records.
I run my own CA and DNS, and can create vanity TLDs like: a.git, a.webmail, b.sync, etc for internal services. These are CNAMEs pointing to A records.
RFC 6762 defines the TLDs you can use safely in a local-only context:
*.intranet
*.internal
*.private
*.corp
*.home
*.lanBe a selfhosting rebel, but stick to the RFCs!
How do you get https on those though? A lot of random stuff requires https these days.
https is not a problem. But you’ll need an internal CA and distributed its certificate to your hosts’ trust store.
everything under *.home.mydomain.tld is reserved for internal use.
I use *.home.mydomain for publicly-accessible IPs (IPv6 addresses plus anything that I’ve port forwarded so it’s accessible externally) and *.int.mydomain for internal IPv4 addresses.
I own lastname.me and lastname.dev and everything public is lastname.me and everything local ist lastname.dev. I don’t have a VPS anymore so the .me domain is a bit useless and only relevant for emails these days but I’d have something like nc.lastname.me for my public next cloud instance and docs.lastname.dev for my paperless instance that I don’t want to have on somebody else’s machine.
Why use a different domain for local as external?
GDI, I have been using internal.registereddomain.com which is 5 wasted characters…
I own both `mydomain.com` and `mydomain.net`, and the `.net` is all my internal services (eg `homeassistant.mydomain.net`). The public `.com` domain I use exclusively for email and a static site.
I had some old employer with a similar segmentation so it just made sense to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had problems with .local because it’s used for MDNS and too lazy to figure out how that works so now I just use lan but I also own a .com domain so I have started to use that more
Nothing. I have all devices using tailscale DNS and I refer to things in my network by their host name directly.
I own both mydomain.com as well as mydomain.me. I use the *.me as my local domain and *.com for the real world.
If you want to avoid problems, use TLD that are assigned for this purpose, for example
.home.arpa
or.home
or.lan
or.private
etc.Avoid using
.local
because its already used by mDNS.I use .lan for anything local and my public domain is .net for anything publicly hosted.
.local
is mDNS - and I’m using that, saves me so much hassle with split-horizon issues etc.I also use global DNS for local servers (AAAA records on my own domain), again, this eliminates split-horizon issues. Life is too short to deal with the hassle of running your own DNS server.
I mean… I use xtremeownage.com
But, ya know… I own it. Although, I use a few subdomains for my home-network, with a split-horizon DNS setup.
.uk, but it is an actual .uk that I’ve registered.