.local over PPP

[jnichols51]

I am fairly new to networking and Ubuntu. With that said, I have setup a server (Ubuntu 10.10 I believe) and configured PPP to work. I am using a laptop with Ubuntu 11.10 I believe on it. I can connect to VPN and have some static routes setup so I can ping 192.168.0.XX on my network but all other Internet traffic goes to the Internet.

My issue is that I have installed avahi on the server and when I am at home I can reach systems on the network with [Server Name].local just fine. But when I connect to VPN I have to use the IP to connect. How is the best way to accomplish this without adding the names manually to my Hosts file?

[Sergius14]

Standard computers relies on DNS to match names-IPs. You have to have a DNS Server to do name translations or rely on etc/hosts.

Linux (and Windows, Mac, etc.) relies first on local /etc/hosts and then to local DNS (resolv.conf).

If you have an internal - local - domain, you have to share the same dns servers over every client to translate your local domain queries. You may shall/shall not do recursive queries for non-local domains (aka "Internet"), depending if you want to browser Internet or not.

You should avoid using DNS1 for local queries DNS2 for Internet, since all OS's only ask to DNS2 when DNS1 is not repling at all. A domain not found reply, it is a reply and DNS2 is not asked.


On Windows you may get confused with this, because by default Windows implements a protocol over TCP/UDP/IP called NetBIOS which has its own naming resolution (similar but not the same as DNS).

[jnichols51]

I am using Ubuntu on the server and mainly OS X Snow Leopard for the machine using VPN.

So if I am understanding you right, I need to setup a DNS server on my local network in order to process .local requests over VPN? I thought .local was just sending some kind of broadcast packet to see if any servers respond. Which is why I thought I might have setup something wrong that wasn't allowing the response to come back down VPN.

I had also tried to use the Tivo App over VPN from my iPhone. But the app couldn't find my Tivo box which I suspected was the same issue. It tries to get the IP of the Tivo by name but because those responses aren't coming back over VPN, it can't find anything.

[jnichols51]

I am still trying to figure this one out. It appears that my router is providing DNS. I can ping my server name (example.local) from another server connected to the same router. dig example.local shows the IP of my router as responding. But when I am in PPTP it appears to be getting the DNS from that same router. My server shows the router IP in /etc/resolv.conf but on the system I am connecting from I am getting 3 DNS with the last IP being my local host. The first two are showing the same DNS my router is handing out I think. I have also tried to connect with my iPad and while I can reach my Apache server using the internal IP, I can't get to it with example.local.

I have even added my router as the DNS under the VPN config on my desktop. It still hasn't changed anything.