Certain domain names are locally routed only. So if you use internal or local as a tld, you can just assign whatever names you want and your computer won’t go looking out on the internet for them. This means you and I can both have fileserver.local as an address on our respective network without conflicting. It’s the URI equivalent of 192.168.0.0/16.
Sure, you can do whatever you want. You could even use non-rfc1918 addresses and nobody can stop you. It’s just not always a great idea for your own network’s functionality and security. You can use an unregistered TLD if you want, but it’s worth knowing that when people and companies did that in the past, and the TLD was later registered, things didn’t turn out well for them. You wouldn’t expect .foo to be a TLD, right? And it wasn’t, until it was.
Ah good point. I guess a future-proofed guarantee that the domain will never be used externally would be easier to use than trying to somehow configure my DNS to never update specific addresses.
German router and network products company AVM learned the hard way that this is a bad idea. They use fritz.box for their router interface page and it was great until tld .box became publicly available and somebody registered fritz.box.
Having a reserved local/internal only tld is really great to prevent such issues.
I agree that this is a good idea, but I wanted to add that if someone owns a domain already, they can also use that internally without issue.
If you own a domain and use Let’s Encrypt for a star cert, you can have nice, well secured internal applications on your network with trusted certificates.
That is great when using only RFC 1918 IPv4 addresses in the network, but as soon as IPv6 is added to the mix all those internal only network resources can becomes easy publicly available and announced.
Yes, this can be prevented with firewalling but it should be considered.
If you just run a personal private network, then yea pick anything because you can change it fairly easily. Companies should try to stick to things that they know won’t change under them just to avoid issues
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Why do I care what ICANN says I can do on my own network? It’s my network, I do what I want.
Certain domain names are locally routed only. So if you use internal or local as a tld, you can just assign whatever names you want and your computer won’t go looking out on the internet for them. This means you and I can both have fileserver.local as an address on our respective network without conflicting. It’s the URI equivalent of 192.168.0.0/16.
Interesting that you should use “.local” as an example, as that one’s extra special, aka Multicast DNS
YouCANN do anything you want?
Try using .com for your internal network and watch the problems arise. Their choice to reserve .internal helps people avoid fqdn collisions.
See also https://traintocode.com/stop-using-test-dot-com/
Well as long as the TLD isn’t used by anyone it should work internally regardless of what ICANN says, especially if I add it to etc/hosts
Sure, you can do whatever you want. You could even use non-rfc1918 addresses and nobody can stop you. It’s just not always a great idea for your own network’s functionality and security. You can use an unregistered TLD if you want, but it’s worth knowing that when people and companies did that in the past, and the TLD was later registered, things didn’t turn out well for them. You wouldn’t expect .foo to be a TLD, right? And it wasn’t, until it was.
Ah good point. I guess a future-proofed guarantee that the domain will never be used externally would be easier to use than trying to somehow configure my DNS to never update specific addresses.
German router and network products company AVM learned the hard way that this is a bad idea. They use fritz.box for their router interface page and it was great until tld .box became publicly available and somebody registered fritz.box.
Having a reserved local/internal only tld is really great to prevent such issues.
I agree that this is a good idea, but I wanted to add that if someone owns a domain already, they can also use that internally without issue.
If you own a domain and use Let’s Encrypt for a star cert, you can have nice, well secured internal applications on your network with trusted certificates.
That is great when using only RFC 1918 IPv4 addresses in the network, but as soon as IPv6 is added to the mix all those internal only network resources can becomes easy publicly available and announced. Yes, this can be prevented with firewalling but it should be considered.
You don’t even need a star cert… The DNS challenge works for that use case as well.
I agree, if you’re putting your internal domain names into the public DNS you do not need a star cert.
No, you don’t need to do that.
Maybe I’m missing something then, how would you pass a DNS challenge?
If you just run a personal private network, then yea pick anything because you can change it fairly easily. Companies should try to stick to things that they know won’t change under them just to avoid issues
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The value of the DNS is that we all use the same one. You can declare independence, but you’d lose out on that value.
the only losers in this situation are people that are squatting on my rightfully pirated domain names!