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General NSP

Looking up .local DNS names under OSX

My workplace uses a .local DNS suffix for all internal DNS, which of course causes problems when you’re running a system which uses any form of mdns – such as OSX or Ubuntu (or probably any modern Linux distro, I know SuSE had this problem about 6 years ago). The .local lookups fail, because mdns takes over. (Thanks John and Phil for reminding me of this). This shows up as resolution via host or dig working fine, as they make calls direct to your nameservers, but commands like ping failing, as it uses the NSS to do the lookup.

A quick bit of googling, and I found this gem on Apple’s website, and also this one on www.multicastdns.org. Apple’s suggested fix didn’t seem to work, but I suspect a reboot is required. I’ve applied the second one, and rebooted, and one of them is definitely working.

As an aside, this started with me wishing that it was possible to do per-domain resolver configuration. I initially gave up and set up dnsmasq which forward on requests to specific domains to specific servers, but then hit the mdns issue. This method looks very much like a per-domain resolver configuration however – it’s saying to use my local DNS server for .local lookups. I haven’t tested it, but it looks like it should support setting an arbitrary resolver for an arbitrary domain.

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