Is it possible to change the TLD from .awl?

[Darthagnon]

I use AWL for home server stuff, and on my physical LAN, all computers are set up to use mDNS/Bonjour/Avahi/Zeroconf, which advertises them as hostname.local. As far as I know, this cannot be changed (?), so I access my server at http://myhomeserver.local. Outside, I use AWL, which advertises at http://myhomeserver.awl, which means two sets of browser bookmarks are needed. If I could configure the AWL TLD to something other than .awl, I could change it to .local and only need 1x set of bookmarks for homeserver stuff.

[Darthagnon]

I have noticed that Lanemu, a similar P2P VPN project, which uses Bittorrent instead of STUN/TURN (or whatever it's called) and TAP instead of TUN is able to forward mDNS/Bonjour/Avahi/Zeroconf DNS names, e.g. I can access peers at http://peername.local if they have iTunes installed (iTunes installs Bonjour as a dependency), even though Lanemu does not do any DNS serving itself. Whereas with AnywhereLAN, mDNS traffic is not forwarded over the VPN, so I cannot access peers at both http://peername.awl and http://peername.local, and peer addresses must be juggled between .local and .awl depending on whether I am on home LAN or VPN

I have heard that mDNS normally does not forward its traffic over VPNs (in my experiments with my work's OpenVPN network, I am not able to forward peer DNS names from Avahi hosts. StackOverflow suggests that some sort of relay or forwarder is needed), but is is a happy coincidence that it does in the case of Lanemu.

I don't suppose this feature of forwarding mDNS traffic could be brought to AnywhereLAN? That would fulfil my needs, as I want to be able to access my peers and homeserver(s) at the same address...

[Nachlor]

I don't suppose this feature of forwarding mDNS traffic could be brought to AnywhereLAN? That would fulfil my needs, as I want to be able to access my peers and homeserver(s) at the same address...

Sadly, that's not possible on Layer 3 VPNs like AWL / WireGuard.

There're some complex workarounds like GRE / VXLAN:

• https://gist.github.com/zOrg1331/a2a7ffb3cfe3b3b821d45d6af00cb8f6

However, it's much easier routing such VPNs through Lanemu:

• Support mDNS for name and service resolution tailscale/tailscale#1013 (comment)

You just need to add your AWL IP in Lanemu "Known Hosts" and that's it :)

[pymq]

Hi @Darthagnon

I think there will be a collision if awl uses the .local TLD simultaneously with mDSN, etc. Also I'm not sure if I want to make the TLD customizable for end users. But if you're curious to test it out, you can simply try changing it here to local and recompiling.

Personally I had the same problem, so I decided to only use awl to connect to my devices. In LAN it uses a direct connection anyway, so the performance drop is negligible.