Note: you can feel free to answer this or close it, but I’m going to open a new question based on stuff I’ve found over the past hour or so. Here is the new question.
I have a new Mac Mini on my local network. I’m trying to do basic local network setup. It works completely to get to the “real” internet, but though other Macs on the local net can see it via my local router’s DNS server, it seems to not want to pay attention to the local domain at all.
Calling the new Mini “newmac” and my MacBook “oldmac”, they both have (at least superficially) the same settings in the System Settings views for Network DNS and for all the “Sharing” settings. Both are up-to-date Tahoe. The “newmac” fixed IP address is correctly being handed out by my router. From “oldmac” I can type
dig newmac
without my local domain name, and the correct thing happens; I get back the DNS response from my router and it is correct.
From “newmac” however, if I do
dig oldmac
it immediately comes back with an NXDOMAIN failure.
I’m no networking expert so I don’t have a clue what this means, but one difference I see in the dig output from both machines (new and old) are the “flags” listed. On my old machine, doing a dig to the new one shows:
; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> newmac.myname.home
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 64662
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
with the flags “qr”, “aa”, “rd”, “ra”. On the new mac however, it’s got “ar” instead of the “aa” flag (when it gets the NXDOMAIN error). I do not know what those flags mean or where they come from.
There’s an older Mini on the same network and it also works fine. I’m sure there’s some simple toggle somewhere I need to fiddle with to make this work, but I’m not sure what to do. Oh and I’ve verified that the Mini is using the correct local domain name, and it is using the local DNS server in my router; all that’s clear from the dig output.
(Note: I don’t know whether the way I’ve set up my local domain is good or bad, but it’s been working just fine for almost 2 decades, and it works fine in particular for other MacOS boxes.)
Here’s the complete dig output from “newmac”:
; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> oldmac.myname.home
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 38106
;; flags: qr rd ra ad; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;oldmac.myname.home. IN A
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
. 86400 IN SOA a.root-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 2025112200 1800 900 604800 86400
;; Query time: 203 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.50.1#53(192.168.50.1)
;; WHEN: Sat Nov 22 09:28:34 CST 2025
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 123
(edit: checking my router now to see if there are weird flags or something about how its DNS server responds to clients.)
oh also, it doesn’t make a difference if I use dig -4.
Also also, scutil --dns gives the same output (except for the if_index) for both machines.
e: tried giving the new Mini a different static IP, no effect. (Well it gets the new IP but behaves the same way.)
e: I’ve installed Wireshark on both the new and old machines. On the old (working) machine, when I do a lookup of “newmac” (or anything else) I see the DNS requests correctly going to my DNS server. When I try that on “newmac”, however, I see no DNS requests at all.
