Comment 47 for bug 80900

Apple, whose OS X Yosemite (10.10) will not even resolve DNS when internet is down ("private networks don't exist"), simply chose the wrong name for something that is basically only used by machines.

Their ".local" is not meant for manual use.

They could just as easily have called it ".mdns" or something -- OS X will by default not show it anyway I'm sure.

So they have claimed something they were not entitled to and their broken model of network computing is now the foundation of how to do things?

  * The local DNS server timeout issue is not really an issue; if you didn't want that you shouldn't have chosen .local for mdns.

  * .local leakage is no different from .home leakage and in this case can be prevented

  * redirecting local services would require upstream malicious .local to be configured in DNS servers but is directly at odds with the situation in which a _local_ .local DNS server is configured, so can also be solved by only allowing .local to get out if there IS a local .local DNS server

  * The only real argument that remains is name resolution; automatic changing of host names in cast of conflicts. RFC 6762 notes that

"Implementers MAY choose to look up such names concurrently via other
   mechanisms (e.g., Unicast DNS) and coalesce the results in some
   fashion. Implementers choosing to do this should be aware of the
   potential for user confusion when a given name can produce different
   results depending on external network conditions (such as, but not
   limited to, which name lookup mechanism responds faster)."

Lennart likes to scream about people not listening to the designers; but what does he do?

    The typical use case of a merged system is when DHCP provides DNS through supplied
    hostnames, there is no resolution in that sense, at least no standard one.

    The DHCP set would remain unchanged (and unresolved) while the mDNS set, oblivious
    to anything happening in unicast DNS, would produce different names where some of them
    would change, adding new ones to the total set. Those new names would only be resolvable
    through mDNS. Unless you were talking about a huge network (why would you use multicast
    in such a system?) the actual prevalence of such conflicts and confusion must be considered
    low.

    I think it can be argued that discovery is a much more important aspect of mDNS than
    resolution because most hardware devices pick MAC-based names and most operating systems
    also pick randomized names by default.

    Anything else reeks of configuration, and if you configure, you are not in zeroconf.

    So there aren't really any reasons that are deal-breaking, and those that exist are caused
    by mDNS' insistence to use for its automated system a human-meaningful name such as .local,
    which is a design flaw.