Short answer to all of your questions is yes, you can do this.  I did it 
for several years, and it came in really handy when I wanted to control 
the Internet usage of my pubescent children.

I set up DNS locally - I used georgetoft.com and had it split - outside 
my house (public) only had the simple entries for the A, MX, CNAME 
records.  Inside my house, I included the file server, FTP, web and mail 
server hosts.

Then I set up a DHCP server that issued my DNS server's IP as part of 
the DHCP response.  That way, everyone in the house could access the 
internal resources.

Now when my teenage children got the hormones and thought they knew more 
than me, I set up two different DHCP configs and used cron to activate 
one profile in the daytime and a different one at night.  To make this 
work, I turned off DHCP and WiFi on the Internet Gateway and used my own 
DHCP server and WiFi Access Point, with a TTL of 60 seconds.  At the 
appointed time, the nighttime profile kicked in which only allowed the 
approved MAC addresses to get a DHCP address, effectively cutting them 
off from the Internet both by their PC and their phones.  They were out 
of high school before they figured out how to make their phones into 
hotspots - LOL.

As far as running your own mail server - yes you can (and I did for a 
while), but the effort really isn't worth it.  Back when I would get 1 
or 2 SPAM per week, and took great delight in tracking down their mail 
provider and ISP and filing SPAM complaints, but when it ramped up to 
50/day, I outsourced it to a provider that managed SPAM blocking.  I 
tried blacklisting entire countries by IP - that helped.  I tried 
subscribing to blacklists - that helped, but in the end, I had more 
important things to do than spend hours per week managing an email server.

Regards,

George Toft

On 10/29/2022 8:07 AM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> For some reason .local popped into my head this morning.  From what I 
> read it appears I may be able to create an Intranet that has a private 
> domain name such as MyBusiness.local, on a private IP, and I am 
> thinking I can run BIND and make a zone file for this Intranet.  In 
> this case, if I am in he local net I can bring it up with  
> MyBusiness.local??  If so then I should be able to add subdomains to 
> the local BIND/zone... So will this private network work like the 
> public Internet?
>
> This makes me believe I can create a mail server on this private net 
> for the users of this private net.  Not that I want to, however it is 
> interesting.
>
> I read that MAC is doing something with the .local domain so it was 
> recommended to use:
>
> .test
> .example
> .invalid
> .localhost
>
> Would it be possible to create a private network using one of these 
> private TLDs and can I use BIND to control this?
>
> How will my browser know to go to my private domain if I use one of 
> these private domains - I seem to recall needing to put this in the 
> hosts file on Linux and Windows so it would resolve.  Would BIND 
> override this?
>
> Thanks!!
> Keith
>
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