We all know about DNS, and how it forms one of the foundations of the Internet. With a hierarchical system of caching DNS resolvers, it provides a scalable system by which domain names (such as starbeamrainbowlabs.com) can be translated into their associated IP address (such as 2001:41d0:e:74b::1 or 5.196.73.75). You can register your own domain name for a modest fee, and point it at a web server to host a website.

But what about a local home network? In such an environment, where devices get switched on and off and enter and leave the network on a regular basis, manually specifying DNS records for devices which may even have dynamic IP addresses is a chore (and dynamic DNS solutions are complex to setup). Is there an easier way?

As I discovered the other day, it turns out the answer is yes - and it comes in the form of Multicast DNS, which abbreviates to MDNS. MDNS is a decentralised peer-to-peer protocol that lets devices on a small home network announce their names and their IP addresses in a standard fashion. It's also (almost) zero-configuration, so as long as UDP port 5353 is allowed through all your devices' firewalls, it should start working automatically.

Linux users will need avahi-daemon installed and running, which should be the default on popular distributions such as Ubuntu. Windows users with a recent build of Windows 10 should have it enabled by default too - and if I understand it right, macOS users should also have it enabled by default (though I don't have a mac, or a Windows machine, to check these on).

For example, if Bob has a home network with a file server on it, that file server might announce it's name as bobsfiles. This is automatically translated to be the fully-qualified domain name bobsfiles.local.. When Bill comes around to Bob's house and turns on his laptop, it will send a multicast DNS message out to ask all the supporting hosts on the network what their names and IP addresses are to add them it it's cache. Then, all Bill has to do is enter bobsfiles.local. into their web browser (or file manager, or SSH client, any other networked application) to connect to Bob's file server and access Bob's cool rocket designs and cat pictures.

This greatly simplifies the setup of a home network, and allows for pseudo-hostnames even in a local setting! Very cool. At some point, I'd like to refactor my home network to make better use of this - and have 1 MDNS name per service I'm running, rather than using subfolders for everything. This fits in nicely with some clustering plans I have on the horizon too.....

With a bit of fiddling, you can assign multiple MDNS names to a single host too. On Linux, you can use avahi-publish:

avahi-publish --address -R bobsrockets.local X.Y.Z.W

...where X.Y.Z.W is your local machine's IP, and bobsrockets.local is the .local MDNS domain name you want to assign. This is a daemon process that needs to run in the background apparently which is a bit of a pain - but hopefully there's a better solution out there somewhere.