RE: apparent change in hostnames on LAN without admin intervention

[Bonno Bloksma <b.bloksma@tio.nl>]

Hi,

> > I could be quite wrong, but I thought that "local" was actually 
> > suggested as a domain name at one time by the installer. (And I 

Don't know if Debian did that but ... a LOONG time ago, at least looong in "internet years", it was indeed recommended to use the "real" domain name for the servers that could be reached from the internet and to use the same corp part but .local as TLD for the internal network. That was supposed to avoid confusion with duplicate names in use for different servers/services.
In our case I was supposed to use tio.nl for public stuff and tio.local for internal stuff.

Me, I never understood that. If it has the same name it should be the same server/service, both internal and external. For internal stuff I simply use a subdomain name like staff.tio.nl for stuff that relates to the staff and student.tio.nl for stuff that relates to the students.
But.... at one time it was the "official policy" to use .local for internal stuff. It was even in documentation and course material in those days.
That was of course years before someone decided to use .local for mDns which then led to the current confusion. :-(

Bonno Bloksma