Bug#1054557: Suggest home.arpa instead of "make something up" during installation if no dedicated domain name
Package: debian-installer
Version: 20230607+deb12u2
As a part of the network configuration during the system installation,
the Debian installer prompts the user for a host name and a domain
name.
The domain name prompt includes the text:
"If you are setting up a home network, you can make something up, but
make sure you use the same domain name on all your computers."
It is generally undesirable to "make something up" with regards to a
domain name, as anything a user is likely to come up with can easily
cause DNS name conflicts either now or in the future, itself leading
to hard-to-diagnose connectivity issues and nonintuitive error
responses. It should be expected that any system installed today
likely will be connected to the Internet; therefore, where possible,
defaults and suggestions should encourage the use of settings which
make conflicts with other hosts on the global Internet less likely.
RFC 8375 of May 2018 (with a current status of Proposed Standard)
specifically reserves a special-use domain name for "non-unique use in
residential home networks". This is similar to the IPv4 address
reservations for "private Internets" in RFC 1918 (192.168.0.0/16,
172.16.0.0/12, 10.0.0.0/8).
The domain name reserved by RFC 8375 for this purpose is "home.arpa.".
The Debian installer should suggest to use that as the domain name
unless the user has specific cause to use a different domain name.
Proposed replacement text:
"If you are setting up or joining a network for which you do not have
another domain name to use, you should enter 'home.arpa' here."
It may even be beneficial if this is also reflected by the field being
pre-populated with "home.arpa".
--
Michael Kjörling
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