Re: Re: Would love to see reconsideration for domain and search

[Isaac Dunham <ibid.ag@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 06:02:15PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> The only place adding search support might negatively impact existing
> musl users is by causing hostnames with no dots to be queried with the
> (often useless and unwanted) default domain set by dhcp before
> failing. My preference would probably be having musl default to
> ndots=0 rather than ndots=1 so that search has to be enabled
> explicitly. Are there any reasons this would be undesirable?

Could you explain what this all would mean to someone who has only a
general understanding of how DNS works, a home network, and a desire
to set up a local DNS server?

I have a couple use-cases in mind, which I think involve either the
"search" or "domain" keywords in resolv.conf; I'll describe them in case
they pertain.

1: the university I attended had a bunch of resources which were available
as sub-domains. The way DHCP/DNS/resolv.conf was set up, local sites
(for example, http://myweb.csuchico.edu/) were available using only the
bare subdomain (in the same example, http://myweb/); I forget whether
they used "domain" or "search" for this. This was something I
appreciated.

2: On my home network (configured via DHCP, no DNS server yet), I have a
network printer that advertises itself using a name in the general format
of MFC0000DEADBEEF (where 0000DEADBEEF is the MAC address, stripped of
separators). It uses this hostname for DHCP and avahi.
However, this name is only available for avahi clients like cups; I
want to be able to access it by the same name from non-avahi programs
like 'ping', 'links', etcetera, since it's rather annoying to have a
'magic' name that usually works in your printing daemon, but no way
to map it to an IP for any troupleshooting/configuration tools.

Currently, I've got it set up so the printer has a static lease and I
thus know the IP, but I want to use DNS because that's the only way all
tools on all computers on the network will automatically know that
MFC0000DEADBEEF is (for example) IP 192.168.255.255.
It would be rather annoying to have some tools where I can use that name,
and some where I need to specify "mfc0000deadbeef.local" instead.

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham