RFC6761 and 6762 outline "reserved tlds" for private use and make some
suggestions.  The real question is if IANA is going to recognize them.
They supposedly do, but it's not really official.  I remember when .dev and
.qa were registered by google and caused all sorts of havok.  You're really
taking your environment into your own hands when you do that.

I highly recommend not using .local.  There was a time when mdns resolver
in nsswitch would break on .local resolves, and they had to include an
mdns-minimal option to still allow it to work (multicast dns).  This is
usually not an issue since the mdns abomination is mostly not used, but it
crops up from time to time since it's a thing.

The list: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6762#appendix-G
IANAs list:
https://www.iana.org/assignments/special-use-domain-names/special-use-domain-names.xhtml

On Sat, Oct 29, 2022 at 9:44 AM Ryan Petris via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

> .local is generally reserved for Avahi/Bonjour. The simplest case is say
> your computer name is "mypc", then on another machine on the same network,
> you can access that pc via "mypc.local", assuming you have public services
> running on it.
>
> If you're just wanting a domain to use within your local network, I would
> refrain from using .local so that it doesn't conflict with this. I
> personally use ".lan" for stuff local to my network, but that's also not
> best practice.
>
> Ideally, you'd own a real domain, for instance "mydomain.com", then use
> something like "*.lan.mydomain.com" for local network stuff. You can
> still use a local bind so nothing is public but you can guarantee that you
> won't conflict with anything else that way.
>
> On Sat, Oct 29, 2022, at 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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-- 
James McPhee
jmcphe@gmail.com