On 25 Oct 2023 21:23 -0400, from monnier@iro.umontreal.ca (Stefan
Monnier):
If you go with the domain name home.arpa and an IPv4 subnet sliced
out
of one of 192.168.0.0/16, 172.12.0.0/12 or 10.0.0.0/8, you can be
_almost certain_ that nothing will break because of those choices,
now
_or_ in the future.
Aside: I realized after sending the email quoted above that I'd made a
mistake. The subnet is 172.16.0.0/12, not 172.12.0.0/12. Apologies.
100% agreement.
It's just such a shame that they chose a name which refers to "arpa"
in
it, which is not only US-centric but even belongs to the US's war
department, which I find rather unpalatable.
I understand ARPA was closely related to the beginnings of the
Internet,
but... couldn't they choose something a bit more neutral?
As already mentioned, it has been backronymed. Also, "arpa." already
existed, and is well established for infrastructure names in DNS. For
example both IPv4 and IPv6 reverse DNS are served under the arpa zone;
in-addr.arpa and ip6.arpa respectively. To "choose something a bit
more neutral", assuming such a name could be found (it seems likely
that almost anything reasonable could match _some_ government agency
_somewhere_ and therefore be, to borrow your phrasing, "unpalatable"
to some) would mean having to register and maintain (or at the very
least reserve) a new TLD just for the purpose, which was the problem
from RFC 7788 that RFC 8375 aimed to solve. Certainly "local." would
have been one possibility, but that is reserved _specifically_ for
mDNS (RFC 6762) although is often incorrectly used for non-mDNS names.