Redirecting ".local" subdomain to unicast DNS

Question

I regularly access Windows domains that have been set up to use a domain under the .local top level name. This conflicts with Bonjour/Zeroconf which reserves .local for it's own use. A number of platforms support Bonjour out of the box (including Mac OS, iPhone, and Ubuntu) and there's numerous name resolution issues when this confict occurs.

I have a manual (per workstation) workaround in place for Mac OS by creating an /etc/resolver/ntdomain.local as per resolver(5) which works well. Unfortunately this requires manual changes on every workstation and does not work on the iPhone.

What I'm looking for is a way to redirect requests for *.ntdomain.local coming in via mDNS to a specific unicast DNS server. I don't mind writing some code if required. I can deploy on either preferably Debian or alternatively Windows 2003. It looks like Avahi may be the library I'm looking for.

Can this be done without registering every address in the subdomain or is it possible to register a single NS record of ntdomain.local that points to the Windows DNS server?

Answer 1

You can "merge" the unicast and multicast .local namespaces (with unicast taking precedence) as explained on Avahi and Unicast .local. Apple has instructions for doing the same on Mac OS X.

Another option is to add domain-name=.localnet to /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf to have it use .localnet instead of .local for the multicast DNS namespace.