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.
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.
do not use
.local, as tempting as it may beuse
.homepersonally“.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.
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.
.localis 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 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
.uk, but it is an actual .uk that I’ve registered.
.damo
I own both mydomain.com as well as mydomain.me. I use the *.me as my local domain and *.com for the real world.
I use homelab…org
.app is suuuper cheap even for three letter domains. I picked one up for pennies with three letters that mean something to me and my partner and use a pair of redundanct piholes to serve local DNS for that domain. Externally it’s hosted on DigitalOcean for stuff I want external.
maybe not directly answer for you, but I just literally bought 4 domains for 3 euro per year (renews at the same price!) 5 minutes ago :D.
The catch - it has to be 9 numbers.xyz (see https://gen.xyz/1111b for details).
I have an io domain - mylastname.io
AD domain is home.mylastname.io
A place I put most apps running on my Kubernetes cluster is *.apps.mylastname.io
I’ve never used DNS in my local network (because it’s additional burden to support, so I tried to avoid it), but couple of month ago when I needed several internal web-sites on standard http port, I’ve just came up with “localdomain.”
Yep, it’s non-standard too, but probability of it’s usage of gTLD is lowest among all other variants because of it’s usage in Unix world and how non-pretty it is :)
If DNS is a burden to support you’re doing it wrong. I set it up once and haven’t touched it since. Everything new that gets added “just works”.
It’s not like DNS is a huge burden by itself, it’s just approach of avoiding creation of critical services unless they become necessary. Because infrastructure around them is a burden: they needs additional firewall rules on middleboxes, monitoring, redundancy, IaC, backups etc.
I don’t fully follow that but like I said, sounds like you’re doing it wrong if you have to alter firewall rules every time you add a host because of DNS issues.
I am not speaking about maintainance of DNS zones (that’s easy), but about maintanance of authoritative DNS servers.
GDI, I have been using internal.registereddomain.com which is 5 wasted characters…