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I used to use .local as TLD for small household networks however I got a popup that I wasn't allowed to use it anymore after a firmware upgrade of an Asus Router. I choose now for .lan as internal TLD. Apart from MS Technet / MS best practice / issues with Apple devices to stop using .Local anymore is there any other reason to stop using it?

MKZ
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The .local is assigned as a Special-Use Domain Name by IANA, as it's used by Multicast DNS (RFC 6762, 3). RFC 2606 specifies .test, .example, .invalid and .localhost for testing & documentation examples. Therefore, they should never be registered as official TLDs, but they do have some special purposes, as described in RFC 6761, 6.

I wouldn't use .lan as it's not on the IANA list, although it's listed on RFC 6762 Appendix G.

Then, there's the Special-Use Domain home.arpa., RFC 8375, 3:

The domain name home.arpa. is to be used for naming within residential homenets. Names ending with .home.arpa. reference a zone that is served locally, the contents of which are unique only to a particular homenet and are not globally unique. Such names refer to nodes and/or services that are located within a homenet (e.g., a printer or a toaster).

DNS queries for names ending with .home.arpa. are resolved using local resolvers on the homenet. Such queries MUST NOT be recursively forwarded to servers outside the logical boundaries of the homenet.

Does that fit your needs for small household networks?

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Esa Jokinen
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