4 ms·

I'm not saying your wrong, but frankly, it's 2021, and it should be a lot easier than this to set up hosts internally for home use. We've largely had the inter

by bb88 5y ago

I'm not saying your wrong, but frankly, it's 2021, and it should be a lot easier than this to set up hosts internally for home use. We've largely had the internet broadly for the last 25 years, and the average person should not have to be an expert on wildcard certs/DNS/zeroconf if they want to just have a server running locally. In fact, that's part of the reason things have gone to the cloud, because what should be local internet style appliances (think of a media server that you just plug in and works with your stereo/tv) can't find each other easily -- all because you can't resolve a freakin name on the local DNS without setting up bonjour or your own DNS server.

milofeynman 5y ago
You could just create your own cert and add it to all of your devices, I suppose
- bb88 5y ago
  That doesn't work for certain devices, TV's/IoT devices, etc.
nine_k 5y ago
Give your local box a static IP from a LAN range, give it a name in .local or .lan domain, and you're likely fine. The more interesting stuff begins when you want several boxes, and also your laptops, phones, tablets, etc to form a reasonable LAN, while accessing the internet. Bonus points for remote access to your LAN from outside it using your laptop or phone. Etc, etc.
- filomeno 5y ago
  Why is a local domain useful? I mean, what's wrong with your local machines having only a hostname with no domain at all?
  - mmis1000 5y ago
    I haven't seen many real world software supports lookup remote with a hostname, probably windows itself is the only one that I have seen? Meanwhile, url is almost the universal way for lookup remote machine (besides, of course, IP).
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      That's what mDNS (multicast-DNS) is for (mentioned in the article as the reason to never use .local as a DNS TLD because that conflicts with mDNS). The old Windows hostname lookup is predecessor of modern mDNS, but surprisingly Windows was one of the slowest to adopt modern mDNS. (In part because Microsoft backed a competitor named PNRP: they thought it would be great to have a Distributed Hash Table [DHT] as the data store for hostname lookup rather than just relying on pure "dumb" multicast shouting for anyone on the local segment who can here it. It wasn't a bad idea but managing DHTs is complex and mDNS was a simpler standard.) At this point almost every major OS (including Windows 10 after the right feature update) mDNS mostly just works out of the box: ask for somehostname.local and if a system responds "oh, that's my hostname" things mostly just work. (mDNS was once called "Bonjour" if that helps connect the dots on what it is and how long many OSes have supported it.) So don't use .local for DNS and mDNS works fine in so many cases these days you don't really need set a DNS for your local systems anyway. (Though if you do want a setup, I think this article is correct and home.arpa is the safest option available. .lan is also a bad idea because it isn't RFC protected and could be bought by someone as gTLD just as Google bought .dev.)
  - hda111 5y ago
    No domain at all means it’s possibly publicly resolvable. You don’t want to name your internal webserver just “ws” because this resolves to 64.70.19.33.
  - bb88 5y ago
    If you want to protect a webserver inside your home (which seems like a good idea in 2021), you're going to need SSL -- and that requires a domain. Self signed ssl certs were kinda a solution to this -- and then were largely rejected as being absolutely "insecure" because they, well, were absolutely insecure.
nine_k 5y ago
No, things have gone to the cloud because it's a source of recurring revenue. Is it damn hard to have a cable modem + router box and a WiFi access point in your home? Likely it's a no-brainer; each of them is at least as complex as a DNS server. Incentives matter.
SilverRed 5y ago
DNS was not the reason for the cloud. The devices you talk of exist and DNS is not an issue. Some central discovery server can point you in the right direction if you do not want to set up your own dns. The problem is these products suck really bad. The hardware makers do not get top grade software developers and they do not support their devices for long enough so you get the recent issue with the home cloud nas product that exposed everyones data to the internet and an attacker remotely wiped them all. I would much rather pay google $1/month to hold my data fairly securely than have to trust WD/Seagate/whoever to secure it. And for IoT bits the problem is solved, Apple Home allows local only IoT devices and if you have an ipad or apple tv in your network you can always reach your iot devices without having to care about DNS. You might complain that this is a centralized cloud service but thats not far off what DNS is. You have to ask someone where your network is.

by bb88 5y ago

milofeynman 5y ago

You could just create your own cert and add it to all of your devices, I suppose

bb88 5y ago
That doesn't work for certain devices, TV's/IoT devices, etc.

nine_k 5y ago

Give your local box a static IP from a LAN range, give it a name in .local or .lan domain, and you're likely fine. The more interesting stuff begins when you want several boxes, and also your laptops, phones, tablets, etc to form a reasonable LAN, while accessing the internet. Bonus points for remote access to your LAN from outside it using your laptop or phone. Etc, etc.

filomeno 5y ago
Why is a local domain useful? I mean, what's wrong with your local machines having only a hostname with no domain at all?
- mmis1000 5y ago
  I haven't seen many real world software supports lookup remote with a hostname, probably windows itself is the only one that I have seen? Meanwhile, url is almost the universal way for lookup remote machine (besides, of course, IP).
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    That's what mDNS (multicast-DNS) is for (mentioned in the article as the reason to never use .local as a DNS TLD because that conflicts with mDNS). The old Windows hostname lookup is predecessor of modern mDNS, but surprisingly Windows was one of the slowest to adopt modern mDNS. (In part because Microsoft backed a competitor named PNRP: they thought it would be great to have a Distributed Hash Table [DHT] as the data store for hostname lookup rather than just relying on pure "dumb" multicast shouting for anyone on the local segment who can here it. It wasn't a bad idea but managing DHTs is complex and mDNS was a simpler standard.) At this point almost every major OS (including Windows 10 after the right feature update) mDNS mostly just works out of the box: ask for somehostname.local and if a system responds "oh, that's my hostname" things mostly just work. (mDNS was once called "Bonjour" if that helps connect the dots on what it is and how long many OSes have supported it.) So don't use .local for DNS and mDNS works fine in so many cases these days you don't really need set a DNS for your local systems anyway. (Though if you do want a setup, I think this article is correct and home.arpa is the safest option available. .lan is also a bad idea because it isn't RFC protected and could be bought by someone as gTLD just as Google bought .dev.)
- hda111 5y ago
  No domain at all means it’s possibly publicly resolvable. You don’t want to name your internal webserver just “ws” because this resolves to 64.70.19.33.
- bb88 5y ago
  If you want to protect a webserver inside your home (which seems like a good idea in 2021), you're going to need SSL -- and that requires a domain. Self signed ssl certs were kinda a solution to this -- and then were largely rejected as being absolutely "insecure" because they, well, were absolutely insecure.

nine_k 5y ago

No, things have gone to the cloud because it's a source of recurring revenue. Is it damn hard to have a cable modem + router box and a WiFi access point in your home? Likely it's a no-brainer; each of them is at least as complex as a DNS server. Incentives matter.

SilverRed 5y ago

DNS was not the reason for the cloud. The devices you talk of exist and DNS is not an issue. Some central discovery server can point you in the right direction if you do not want to set up your own dns. The problem is these products suck really bad. The hardware makers do not get top grade software developers and they do not support their devices for long enough so you get the recent issue with the home cloud nas product that exposed everyones data to the internet and an attacker remotely wiped them all. I would much rather pay google $1/month to hold my data fairly securely than have to trust WD/Seagate/whoever to secure it. And for IoT bits the problem is solved, Apple Home allows local only IoT devices and if you have an ipad or apple tv in your network you can always reach your iot devices without having to care about DNS. You might complain that this is a centralized cloud service but thats not far off what DNS is. You have to ask someone where your network is.