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Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by gclawes on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:06PM (#50007569)
RFC 8375: Special-Use Domain 'home.arpa.' is supposed to be used for this.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8375/

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by pqb on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:16PM (#50007714)
It would be awesome if Ubiquity will actually follow this RFC too. The Amplifi product line from Ubiquity have `.lan` support but no `home.arpa`.

[0]: https://amplifi.com/

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by simondotau on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:50PM (#50014583)
Ubiquiti aren't the only ones. OpenWrt (and, by extension, GL.iNet) explicitly refuses to forward .lan DNS queries to public resolvers. This is a good thing: "LAN" has a singular, unambiguous meaning that directly contradicts its use as a public TLD. The fact that we're even debating this is outrageous.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by lxgr on Friday October 09, 2026 @07:43AM (#50019118)
Or ICANN could just do the right thing and reserve .lan as well, which is so much more intuitive and memorable.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by deno on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:19PM (#50007749)
But what if my LAN is in the garage?
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by bandie91 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:09PM (#50013102)
well then it's a home for your lan.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by stop50 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:12PM (#50007655)
Internal. is also an valid option. I moved everything there about a year ago
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by throw0101a on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:59PM (#50008421)
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by jasomill on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:50PM (#50013542)
Looking at your links, subjective and legacy considerations aside, .alt per RFC 9476[1] seems as good a choice as .lan.

Personally, I just use a registered domain for this purpose, as they're cheap enough to not care (last I checked, I pay $10–20/domain/year for registrations, depending on registrar and TLD, and $0.21/zone/month for hosting public zones on Google Cloud).

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9476

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by simondotau on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:56PM (#50014645)
A registered domain has the added benefit that you can use the same namespace for externally accessible services. I personally do this (using Cloudflare Tunnels, not open ports).
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by c0l0 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:10PM (#50007628)
That's nice and all, but OpenWrt (and its use of .lan) predates this particular RFC by a rough 14 years.

I hope the gTLD application gets struck down.

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by pwdisswordfishq on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:19PM (#50007745)
God forbid OpenWrt ever receives an update or something.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by free_bip on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:59PM (#50008432)
You know, just because it's in an RFC doesn't mean it's actually practical. 'home.arpa' is significantly worse than every other option.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by jamesnorden on Thursday October 08, 2026 @03:02PM (#50010431)
An update wouldn't change all the existing configurations.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by c0l0 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:25PM (#50007851)
If you actually think it's a trivial affair to change a well-established default with more than 20 years of history that is, on top of all other difficulties that such a change typically encompasses, used to identify and name things, I hereby beg you to never design or provide any kind of infrastructure.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by esskay on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:21PM (#50007780)
and most people dont use it because its an incredibly poor name.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by lokoj on Thursday October 08, 2026 @03:40PM (#50010968)
Why don't they just put home.arpa or .arpa in their search path?
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by penskymaterial on Thursday October 08, 2026 @05:51PM (#50012884)
What, exactly, makes it poor? Be specific.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by simondotau on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:33PM (#50013374)
I will be very specific about why it is poor. The specific reason is my home network is not the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by brookst on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:22PM (#50013238)
having two levels, for one. "arpa" not being remotely memorably to non-technical people, for another.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by GuB-42 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:28PM (#50013309)
- WTF is arpa? (in reality, I know, but there are better names than an obscure reference to internet prehistory)

- it is a second-level domain, why?

- 9 characters (home.arpa) is a lot

I kind of understand the motivation, it is a "technical" domain since it doesn't represent something in the global DNS registry, so it gets the .arpa TLD. However, that's reasoning that it out of touch from normal users. Normal users don't want to be exposed to the technicalities of DNS when they enter something in the address bar, and "myserver.lan" is more meaningful than "myserver.home.arpa", and giving meaningful names is the whole point of DNS.

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by joquarky on Thursday October 08, 2026 @10:21PM (#50015200)
It feels like a choice that was made at the end of a very long meeting about much more important topics.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by denkmoon on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:47PM (#50013513)
The character count. lan is 3 char, home.arpa is 9. Subjectively, tt is also aesthetically unappealing.

I can't fucking _wait_ to type bender.home.arpa instead of bender.lan. Hyped.

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by _bernd on Thursday October 08, 2026 @07:30PM (#50013914)
Then use search domain and let your DHCP and DHCP6 server hand that out to clients.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by denkmoon on Thursday October 08, 2026 @07:33PM (#50013939)
or we could just not publicly delegate a defacto private space?

Search domain is handy but it's ambiguous.

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by _bernd on Saturday October 10, 2026 @04:34AM (#50030903)
I'm on that side that it was not a good idea right from the beginning. Because this problem exists in small enterprises since ages and the workaround always was to use a domain you own. At home I use home.arpa since 10 or 8 years or something.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by B1FF_PSUVM on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:02PM (#50014153)
> use search domain

I don't know what this means, and searching is thorny. Help?

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by denkmoon on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:05PM (#50014174)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_domain

Your DHCP/SLAAC RA tells clients "here is a list of search domains, when you attempt to query a bare name, also look for the name plus any suffixes listed in the search domain list". So on a system with "home.arpa" in the search domains, you can do something like 'ping myhost' and your system should attempt to resolve 'myhost.home.arpa'.

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by B1FF_PSUVM on Thursday October 08, 2026 @09:42PM (#50014970)
Thanks, appreciated. Forgot that wiki is good at this (and TV series ;-)
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by _bernd on Saturday October 10, 2026 @04:32AM (#50030894)
Next time may narrow down the search space and look for those keywords combinend. The DHCP spec includes the search domain so it's not that hard to find and follow. Of course without any context this search would be not reveal anything useful.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by deno on Friday October 09, 2026 @07:36AM (#50019062)
So now you’re potentially in conflict with ALL gTLDS? I don’t get what this is supposed to accomplish.
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by Palomides on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:32PM (#50007971)
RFCs were originally formalization of what was being used in practice, home.arpa was chosen apparently for reasons of beauracratic convenience rather than what would best serve existing users, who all would prefer .lan and continue to do so since that was published in 2018
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by gumby on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:40PM (#50009090)
> RFCs were originally formalization of what was being used in practice

You may be confusing it with the IETF’s policy.

In early days of the RFCs, most started out as proposals, often but not always with some existing implementation as a jumping-off point to conversation (hence the name). I no longer remember why they started to be numbered and tracked, as the process naturally preceded that.

You can verify what I say by just reading some old ones at the rfc editor site.

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by gavinsyancey on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:38PM (#50013421)
I looked into the actual reasoning here:

- Originally, IETF specified .home, but never went through the process to add it to the list of reserved names.

- Someone applied for the .home gTLD, and while it ultimately didn't go through there was a while while it was up in the air. Due to this the homenet working group had to change gTLDs.

- They decided to switch to .homenet. However, because of DNSSEC, whatever they used would need an insecure delegation in the root zone or validating resolvers wouldn't be able to resolve it. Since IAB controls .arpa but IANNA controls the root and there was no process to ask IANNA for this, they eventually decided to use home.arpa instead.

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/homenet/8cfJkr7SPMaPS4...

RFC 8244 is an interesting read on the topic: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8244/

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by fridder on Thursday October 08, 2026 @05:31PM (#50012613)
.internal as well I believe
Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by greatgib on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:19PM (#50013200)
But why is it that nowadays, it's enough for a vulture corporation to have enough money to be able to privatize a part of the "web" that is in common usage (in the sense of common good) since so long?

It should be logical even without thinking that the request have to be rejected.

Re:New gTLD Application for .lan by brookst on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:21PM (#50013228)
yeah I'm not going to tell my s/o to use plex.home.arpa. instead of plex.lan