Anyone left wondering why their iphone has mysteriously stopped resolving names on their .local domain may find the following of interest.
With the latest Iphone OS4 upgrade, Apple have implemented ‘bonjour’, an propriety apple network service, which apparently makes it easier for your growing collection of shiny apple widgets to find each other. Part of this process involves hijacking any DNS lookups for the .local domain and redirecting them to this service, blissfully ignoring any defined DNS servers.
This wouldn’t be too much of a problem, if for the last decade Microsoft hadn’t been suggesting we use the .local domain suffix for our lans.
The Iphone has a great built-in vpn client & wireless connectivity; many users are using this to connect or tunnel into .local domains. Without proper DNS
resolution in those domains, services such as activesync have been rendered utterly broken without a fair bit of tinkering with DNS and host headers. And it transpires you can’t edit the hosts file in an iphone without jailbreaking it first. Thanks Apple. Can you turn bonjour off? No. Thanks again Apple.
Now the really, really, really annoying bit about this us most about this is that Apple ALREADY KNEW that this would be a problem – and is why OS 10.5 was fixed to refer any .local lookup with a three-part name (eg. exchange.domain.local) to a DNS server, rather than referring it to the rendezvous service.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3473
And if anyone wants anything even more annoying, Apples solution is ‘just rename your domain’
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3389
bah.