Arch Linux

genji

Member

Registered: 2023-08-13

Posts: 61

Why did Arch set my LAN domain to .local , and where is it defined?

Hello there, Arch is the only device on my whole network where I cannot ping it by hostname ('ping arch' says no such host yet every other device on my network is pingable this way.  only thing that works is 'ping arch.local')

But my network-wide domain is .home, not .local

So where, and why, did it decide to apply .local to itself?

It's not misconfigured in OPNsense because I've already looked, and it is set to home

And also my /etc/hosts file is completely blank, only contents is a commented out header at the top of the file

So why did it choose .local?

jonno2002

Member

Registered: 2016-11-21

Posts: 848

Re: Why did Arch set my LAN domain to .local , and where is it defined?

.local is probably cause you have avahi installed, you need winbind which is part of samba, if you already have samba installed make sure that "wins" is in your /etc/nsswitch and start/enable the winbind service and pinging hostnames should work. i just tried it on 2 of my machines and it worked instantly

edit: fixed link to be somewhat more visible

Last edited by jonno2002 (2025-04-10 19:46:18)

genji

Member

Registered: 2023-08-13

Posts: 61

Re: Why did Arch set my LAN domain to .local , and where is it defined?

Thank you very much!

I am a novice user and didn't really understand your post entirely so I asked AI for help and got it done

Just in case anyone else ends up here, to further elaborate on jonno2002's post

It is /etc/nsswitch.conf not /etc/nsswitch , and then I had to find the hosts: line which has a bunch of parameters in it already then added "wins" to that list of parameters and saved the file

Then did ' sudo systemctl enable --now winbind ' which also worked with no problems, but issue still persisted, it is being known as arch.local and does not respond to arch.home or plain 'arch'

Problem is not resolved, still only responding to arch.local even after a full reboot and everything

Thank you kindly for the help so far.  It is still forcing .local as it's domain and have no idea why..  Every other distro or device on my LAN automatically is .home, but not Arch

Last edited by genji (2025-04-10 19:40:08)

jonno2002

Member

Registered: 2016-11-21

Posts: 848

Re: Why did Arch set my LAN domain to .local , and where is it defined?

sorry i did link to the wiki page which explained all that but its easy to miss that link i guess, strange that it did not work for you, what other machines are on your network ? windows/linux ? also can the arch machine ping all those machines by hostname ?

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 74,311

Re: Why did Arch set my LAN domain to .local , and where is it defined?

It's not misconfigured in OPNsense because I've already looked, and it is set to home

OPNsense is a router/firewall, the OP might actually be using some local DNS here.

nmap notarch.home
nmap arch.local
nmap _gateway # literally, from either host

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