Curious lease to/from Apple DHCP Client

[Simon Hobson]

Didier Benza wrote:

>Sten Carlsen wrote :
>>  This is exactly the pattern I observed when I first connected my (then)
>>  brand new MAC to my network; during the next week and using far too much
>>  time I found that the only cure was to switch from an internal tld of
>>  ".local" to something else ".home". Apple uses .local for some other
>>  purpose and things go very wrong.
>>



>Joerg Mayer wrote :
>>  On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 06:27:34PM +0200, Sten Carlsen wrote:
>>  
>>  Just FYI: .local is a special domainname, see:
>>  http://files.multicastdns.org/draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns.txt
>>  More on this topic:
>>  http://dotlocal.org/
>>



>Thanks to you both for your answers. I have heard of ZeroConf in a
>conference, but I didn't see anything relating to this strange DHCP
>comportment...
>I am not a MacOs geek :-[ ,  the .local tld seem to be only the emerged
>part of an iceberg... Do you know if there is a mean to deactivate
>ZeroConf on a Mac and if it solves this curious behaviour ?


As I write this, I'm using 10.4 and plugged into a network with a 
.local domain - it seems to be 'standard practice' in the Windoze 
world to set stuff up as .local unless there's a real domain name to 
use. I've not observed any funny behaviour with DHCP - but I did note 
that in your original logs there were 60 second leases being offered 
which may be a clue as that's far too short for a workable system.

AFAIK it's not possible (or at least easy) to disable zeroconf 
altogether, and it wouldn't be advisable anyway as so much relies on 
it.

AIUI, the main issue is that you can't resolve domain names to 
addresses in the local domain. There are some tech notes about it 
somewhere, but with 10.4 it's apparently solvable by putting "local" 
in the Search Domains box of network settings (for previous versions 
it's a lot more involved).

Simon