Why is adding a new Ubuntu PC to an existing LAN such a pain?

[Derek Broughton]

Brian Fahrlander wrote:

>     There's a tactic I used to help in this exact situation.  Consider
> the ".local" domain.  Hand it to the machine doing DNS for the entire
> site, and make aliases for "www", "dns", "time", and other handy ones.
> Ya do this, because you're not at "mydomain.com"- that's on the outside.
> Using "mydomain.local" solves some problems.
...
>     It's just a really simple addition that makes things easier.  I have
> no idea why people don't do it...though it's just the same thing you'd
> do for the _outside_...

People don't do it because .local (or .localdomain which seemed to be set by
default when I installed Ubuntu) doesn't play well with the Internet.  For
instance, I run leafnode for NNTP on my local net.  Leafnode flat out
refuses to start if your system doesn't have a valid FQDN (I eventually
figured out how to get around it, but the authors think it's a bad idea).
If you own a domain, it works better to use that for the internal network. 
If you run your own SMTP server, it should have a proper FQDN.

In this particular case, I can't see that it makes a difference - if he
can't figure out how to set a domain name on his router, it's moot whether
the domain is hisdomain.org or hisdomain.local :-)
-- 
derek