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563 points joncfoo | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.406s | source
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jcrites ◴[] No.41205444[source]
Are there any good reasons to use a TLD like .internal for private-use applications, rather than just a regular gTLD like .com?

It's nice that this is available, but if I was building a new system today that was internal, I'd use a regular domain name as the root. There are a number of reasons, and one of them is that it's incredibly nice to have the flexibility to make a name visible on the Internet, even if it is completely private and internal.

You might want private names to be reachable that way if you're following a zero-trust security model, for example; and even if you aren't, it's helpful to have that flexibility in the future. It's undesirable for changes like these to require re-naming a system.

Using names that can't be resolved from the Internet feels like all downside. I think I'd be skeptical even if I was pretty sure that a given system would not ever need to be resolved from the Internet. [Edit:] Instead, you can use a domain name that you own publicly, like `example.com`, but only ever publish records for the domain on your private network, while retaining the option to publish them publicly later.

When I was leading Amazon's strategy for cloud-native AWS usage internally, we decided on an approach for DNS that used a .com domain as the root of everything for this reason, even for services that are only reachable from private networks. These services also employed regular public TLS certificates too (by default), for simplicity's sake. If a service needs to be reachable from a new network, or from the Internet, then it doesn't require any changes to naming or certificates, nor any messing about with CA certs on the client side. The security team was forward-thinking and was comfortable with this, though it does have tradeoffs, namely that the presence of names in CT logs can reveal information.

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macromaniac ◴[] No.41209942[source]
>Are there any good reasons to use a TLD like .internal for private-use applications, rather than just a regular gTLD like .com?

These local TLDs should IMO be used on all home routers, it fixes a lot of problems.

If you've ever plugged in e.g. a raspberry pi and been unable to "ping pi" it it's because there is no DNS mapping to it. There are cludges that Windows, Linux, and Macs use to get around this fact, but they only work in their own ecosystem, so you often can't see macs from e.g. windows, it's a total mess that leads confusing resolution behaviour, you end up having to look in the router page or hardcode the IP to reach a device which is just awful.

Home routers can simply assign pi into e.g. pi.home when doing dhcp. Then you can "ping pi" on all systems. It fixes everything- for that reason alone these reserved TLDs are, imo, useful. Unfortunately I've never seen a router do this, but here's hoping.

Also, p. sure I grew up playing wc3 w you?

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1. e28eta ◴[] No.41210333[source]
> Home routers can simply assign pi into e.g. pi.home when doing dhcp. Then you can "ping pi" on all systems. It fixes everything- for that reason alone these reserved TLDs are, imo, useful. Unfortunately I've never seen a router do this, but here's hoping.

dnsmasq has this feature. I think it’s commonly available in alternative router firmware.

On my home network, I set up https://pi-hole.net/ for ad blocking, and it uses dnsmasq too. So as my network’s DHCP + DNS server, it automatically adds dns entries for dhcp leases that it hands out.

There are undoubtably other options, but these are the two I’ve worked with.

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2. macromaniac ◴[] No.41210394[source]
Wasn't aware of dnsmasq/pihole, I have a BIND9 configured to do it on my network and yeah its much nicer. I've seen people get bit by this all the time in college and still even now join projects with like weird hosts file usage. Instead of having 3 different systems for apple/ms/linux name resolution that don't interop the problem is better fixed higher up.