Use .local Domain in Ubuntu 18.04

I have a homelab and part of that homelab is a vSphere deployment. For whatever reason I used vsphere.local as the domain for some functionality. But Ubuntu doesn’t like the .local domain, I believe because it’s usually used with multicast DNS. TBH I’m not going to look to deep into why or why not one should use .local, the fact is that I am and I’m not changing it right now. :)

To use .local in Ubuntu I did this:

$ grep Domain /etc/systemd/resolved.conf 
Domains=vsphere.local

And moved the “dns” option in /etc/nsswitch.conf to be before mdns…

#hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns myhostname
hosts:          files dns mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return]

After that I could resolve .local domains.

Happy .local domaining!