resolving .local addresses

[Bill Moseley]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 1:07 AM, Tim Frost <timfrost at xtra.co.nz> wrote:

>
> > Tried changing the order, but no luck.  Anyone know if I can get host
> > names qualified with .local?
>
> The name server (the machine with IP address 192.168.1.1) needs to have
> a zone named 'local'.  If you run DHCP, and the zone is dynamic, it is
> possible to tell the DHCP server to do the dynamic updates.  If you
> don't use DHCP, you have two choices:
> 1: for a dynamic zone, allow ANY device to do dynamic updates
> 2: manually update the zone (whether the zone is static or dynamic)


Yes, I've simplified my network.  I went from static IPs and a number of
servers including running dhcpd and managing my own zone files to a more
normal home network with an expensive router and a set of decentralized
client machines.  That 192.168.1.1 server is simply my router forwarding on
the dns query to whatever dns server my ISP is telling my router (via dhcpd)
to use.

Now with my new "simplified" LAN I want to be able to plugin in a new
machine "foo" and have other machines be able to resolve "foo" without any
central server or database.  Is that possible with zeroconf?

So, zeroconf and avahi are new to me.  That's the likely problem here.

nsswitch.conf tells my machine how (or where) to lookup host names.  For
example, look in "files" (/etc/hosts) and if that doesn't work then try a
DNS lookup.   And it also seem to work for zeroconf as I can type "ssh
foo.local" and it will resolve foo's address without "foo.local" being in
any centralized database.

I can plug in a new machine and then "ssh foo.local" and foo.local gets
resolved.  Is that just using an apr lookup (i.e. "who has foo.local?")?

But, like resolving with dns, where I can use resolve.conf and tell it to
qualify a name like "foo" -- that is search for  foo.hank.org as well as
just foo I wondering how to have the resolver know to try "foo.local" when I
just type "ssh foo".

Do really need some localized (avahi?) server to support that foo.local
lookup?


I suspect I'm making this more difficult than it is. ;)


-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20090628/3538b08f/attachment.html>