A ways back, I came up with a good use case for supporting mDNS names (say, "OpenWrt.lan") so that we could stop telling people to use 192.168.1.1... If you're curious, the longer note is at: CeroWrt II - would anyone care? - #106 by richb-hanover-priv
Further thoughts:
Like @moeller0 , I am completely content continuing to use the .lan TLD. home.arpa doesn't add anything to the conversation except more typed characters.
We could tell newcomers (who are my primary focus), "Just use Openwrt.lan" and it would work.
The "old hands" have their router's IP addresses welded into their synapses, or at least into their browsers, so they don't need any help.
But the domain for this exclusive purpose is .local - which cannot be used [in an environment where some devices can't use mDNS], so another domain is OK.
Hence, there's no requirement to use an invalid domain.
The Board recommends that efforts be undertaken to raise awareness of its reservation for this purpose through the organization's technical outreach.
-from the same proclamation
"OpenWrt.internal" sounds decent too (and it's now considered valid - adds 5 characters though).
Using .local would be fine. My primary point in that earlier post was that OpenWrt default configuration should always advertise a mDNS name.
That lets us move away from the "tyranny of 192.168.1.1"
[Sidenote:
Why? As my earlier note describes, if the ISP router also uses that same address for its interface, a newcomer is stuck. Our instructions have to explain (and somebody has to write) about IP addresses, subnets, choosing a different subnet from what the ISP uses, etc, etc. etc.
OpenWrt's default configuration could be smart. When a newly-flashed router reboots and discovers the WAN port's current IP address/subnet, it could choose ANY OTHER address/subnet for the LAN port. Default choice would continue to be 192.168.1.1.
But newcomers would read a single-line instruction, "Point you browser to OpenWrt.lan" (or OpenWrt.local but preferably not OpenWrt.home.arpa) and they would actually begin using OpenWrt.
[Recursive sidenote: I want to pre-empt the whole "OpenWrt is about learning" argument here. I'll assert that no one will learn anything about OpenWrt if the "Getting Started" section has a page about IP addresses and subnets. This scares people away from OpenWrt completely... /Sidenote]
/Sidenote]
Well I noted a limitation with using the .local domain on a network where some clients may not be capable of mDNS. Anyway, I was just noting that .internal also works too - following your same theory.
Let's be realistic, internal is used by google internally and still, in spite of having a bunch of well payed competent network engineers, it leaked to the upstream DNS servers... there is no chance in hell that the other leaking TLDs will ever get fixed... so realistically ICANN should not re-use these any time soon anyways...
As above, not clear .internal is much better than .home.arpa, I would stick to .lan and let ICANN figure out whether they really want to monetise .lan as TLD...
I opened this issue and have been quiet for a while. I've come around to the opinion expressed by others: in short, "screw ICANN". .home.arpais absurdly long and there is no way they would ever designate .lan as a global TLD.
On January 24, 2024... ICANN stated that the adoption of a domain explicitly reserved for internal network usage would help minimize usage of uncoordinated and "ad hoc" TLDs, such as .corp, .home, .lan, and .private.
It almost sounds like they read this thread and realized that nobody was using .home.arpa because it was too long.
Considering the market share of OpenWrt and its vendor-created forks, I'm pretty sure .lan is the most common "ad-hoc" local tld. And it's the shortest: 3 letters like any gTLD. It literally stands for "Local Area Network" and nothing else. So why did ICANN use the 8-letter .internal? Power trip?
I've come around 180º on this: I think OpenWrt should keep using .lan and not bend at the knee to ICANN's thick-headedness. Though, if others aren't as stubborn as me and consensus is to switch to .internal, I wouldn't oppose it.
Choosing .internal instead of .lan should help to prevent the name from leaking to root DNS servers.
The reasoning can be reversed.
Why choose a common TLD rather than a standard one? At least, we'd have something uniform. My ISP uses .home, Homenet uses .home.arpa, OpenWrt uses .lan, and so on.
The number of characters composed is irrelevant. You don't wonder how many characters you're going to enter when you type a domain name (or FQDN) into your browser's address bar.
Yeah, but that boat has sailed, even if we start using .internal .lan will continue to leak for a long time if it ever stops. To repeat .internal is used by Google and still leaked massively, and Google has a fleet of well educated network engineers that should be able to stop the leaking.
.lan is not a valid TLD today, so for a root server there is little difference if we start leaking .internal compared to continue leaking .lan. The only meaningful difference I see is that ICANN might have a better chance monetizing .lan by turning it into an official TLD.
So I would stick to .lan and only revisit this if it should become a valid TLD (as that will diminish the utility for us). But I have no real say in that anyway, if the devs switch "our" domain, I am not going to revert back to .lan in my network, so this is really just my subjective opinion, neither better or worse than yours...
Why would we leak .lan or any other TLD we use for our internal names?
This would happen in case someone misconfigured dnsmasq, but the default is to use .lan as local only.
Well, ICANN supported its decision for .internal with leakage numbers for diffetent pseudo TLDs and .lan was one of those. So someone seems to leaking .lan upstream, but it might not be us...
Just to bring thing conversation back. As far as I understand ICANN says about lan domain requests leaking to their DNS servers. In OpenWrt's default config lan request should not leak outside because "Local server" is set to /lan/ but in your case (/home.arpa/) those requests, as far as I understand, will leak. Shouldn't we just list ALL local only domain there? Dnsmasq sample config says: "Add local-only domains here".
So, in your case "Local domain" should remain the same (if you prefer to be RFC-compliant) but "Local server" should include home.arpa and other local-only domains like lan.
One caveat of using "lan." as the domain is that if you type "anything.lan" in a browser and it's not in your history, it will attempt to search for it using the default search engine because it knows it's not a valid domain.
The time it takes to type extra characters will save more user time regardless of how long the new domain is, because users will no longer have to cancel the search query and type it again with http:// and https://, which definitely takes longer.
I've switched to "home.arpa." for a couple of years now and it's been working fine. I think "home.arpa." or "internal.", which has been reserved by ICANN but not by IETF, should be the default and recommended name for new installations and on Wiki pages.
(And while I also think it would be cool if OpenWrt advertised mDNS (.local) by default, this is orthogonal to this feature request and should be discussed separately)
