.LOCAL vs .COM 1

[nelson97]

What's the argument in choosing domain.local vs domain.com? We have one domain and I'll be upgrading from 2000 DC to 2003 DC and plan on renaming the domain name. Right now it's domain.domain.com. Our domain.com is registered and hosted by our ISP. I was thinking of renaming my lan domain.domain.com to xyz.com or xyz.local. I am also planning on eventually setting up an intranet using a dedicated IIS in house.

Thanks

 

[brontosaurus]

The argument is based mostly on DNS (not having to set up a split DNS environment) and then on security (not having a domain name that can be accessed from the internet without a vpn).

 

[ShackDaddy]

I personally like calling the domain: domain.com and just adding records to the internal DNS to resolve external records like for that of externally hosted websites. It keeps everything in line, and "split-dns" doesn't require maintaining two zones locally. Since the external already exists at the ISP, and you're setting up the internal, you're almost there already.

If you don't post your internal host records on the ISP's DNS server, you don't have to worry about intrusion issues, but you'd have to go out of your way to do that foolish thing. DON'T make the ISP's server a secondary server to your internal server!

When I don't choose this option, I choose 'domain.local'. Don't go the 'domain.' route, since there are known problems with this configuration that are sometimes difficult to sort out.



ShackDaddy

http://www.shackelfordconsulting.com

 

[nelson97]

Thanks for the responses...

ShackDaddy, we have a website called domain.com. If I called our internal domain domain.com, wouldn't that create some dns resolution issues? I do not have our internal records published on the ISP's DNS server. Because I picked up that notion that dns issues might occur if i made my internal domain the same name as the website, I thought I could call my internal domain someothername.com instead or simply domain.local. I've researched .local vs .com on line and some posters have said if it's a small network use .local while others say that .local will cause some integration issues.

Thanks

 

[ShackDaddy]

If you name your internal domain .com, the only problems that will come up are the inability of internal clients to resolve the external names you are using with the domain.com domain, such as 'www' and 'mail' if you are hosting mail outside. That's simple to solve, as I described, by creating a few A-records in the internal forward lookup zone for domain.com that point those hostnames to the external IP addresses. I've done it dozens of times without complications.

Some people swear by domain.local, and I've used that too, but it's nice to have a single domain name for users to remember... I don't think using .local causes problems though, nor using some other name. Both just add a very thin layer of complexity for your users.

ShackDaddy

http://www.shackelfordconsulting.com

 

[nelson97]

Got it.... Thanks!

 

[computerMe]

This might help you...

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