• mholiv@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    Humans shouldn’t really be typing in IPs. Why not just use localhost for localhost and dns / mdns for lan machines? It’s such a nicer experience.

    mdns works with link-local in the case of a private non connected lan.

    • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
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      19 hours ago

      Dns doesn’t always work, and seeing if you can connect via IP is often a troubleshooting step

      • mholiv@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        True. But pinging IPs directly should only be done as a debug step when dns / mdns does not work. Aka extremely rarely.This all being said mdns is extremely reliable on lan. It’s literally just multicast dns on lan.

        On my personal home network I have never had mdns fail in 5-ish years. FQDNs yah. DNS can break. But mdns has been solid.

        • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          4 hours ago

          I would like to know more about this mdns.

          In my experience, the following are unreliable, and it’s unclear which one is supposed to work under which context:

          • ping hostname
          • ping hostname.local
          • ping hostname.<whatever that local domain thing is called>

          While pinging the ipv4 address is reliable; if the device is reachable on the network, it should respond.

          • mholiv@lemmy.world
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            2 hours ago

            Happy to help.

            You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS

            You can learn how to configure it here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi

            I see why some people can be confused though. In some distros it needs to be configured. Once you configure it though it should be rock solid.

            There is no reason why an ICMP packet would be more robust than a multicast udp packet.

            The traditional nomenclature is myhostname.local

            Just make sure that the system firewall is configured to allow mdns. That’s the biggest issue. Once you have e that and you have mdns set up it’s good to go.