Johnny Hughes wrote:
Take this name that I use: myth.home.local
$ hostname myth.home.local
I would just like to note a mild warning here about using the ".local" domain.
Systems that implement multicast DNS (mDNS) often reserve the ".local" domain for mDNS lookups (whether this is good or bad has been in dispute). Multicast DNS allows lookup of hosts on the local host by querying all machines on the local network rather than by using a local nameserver.
A box with mDNS turned on will look up ".local" names using mDNS instead of the default nameserver. Both Apple and SuSE systems are configured to have mdns turned on by default.
Before we knew this, we set up our intranet using a ".local" domain. Later, when we added Macs and a lone SuSE system, we found they could not do ".local" lookups in some circumstances. We ended up having to fiddle with the settings on those machines. See for example: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107800.
In retrospect, using "lan" or ".site" or something else would have been better. Since we have our own domain and run our own nameservers, we could also have used something like intranet.ourdomain.com.
Dan