George Toft, have not seem you in a while.  Thanks for all this 
feedback.

Eventually I will configure DNS on my private net.

Love your parental controls!!

I hope to configure a home server in the future.  The first time it was 
so I could say I did it.  The second time (future) I hope to learn a lot 
more and I would like to have the bragging rights.

Keith


On 2022-11-06 07:29, George Toft via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> 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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