Reached the point this evening where I got sick of editing /etc/hosts when doing local development on my MacBookPro.
I have learned enough lately configuring and installing BIND9, that I mustered up the courage to get it running on 127.0.0.1 (theres no place like home).
Using this new fangled Google machine, I drummed up this tasty post. OSX comes packaged with BIND (named is the daemon name), but it is disabled. This post gets you setup and running.
The important thing I have to add to this topic, is that I could not for the life of me figure out what I added my local zone file called mysite.local (versus mysite.com for a production BIND DNS server) it would not respond to queries. Back to the google.
I search for the phrase “osx bind cant ping local domain”, and wouldn’t you know it, the Google machine came through again. I found this post dating back from 2002 that solved the problem. Seeing the date of 2002, I was skeptical since BIND has had some many advances since then, and of course OSX is a totally different beast, but I was desperate. Low and behold they were correct though. It appears that Bonjour will snag queries for domains with TLD of “.local”, thereby cutting BIND completely out of the deal.
I am sure that there is some configuration that could get one past this, but I am fine just moving my local development domains to .net and calling it a job well done.
Thanks Google machine, what in the world would I do without you! (No seriously, I realized the other day, that I would be 1/100th the programmer I am today, not to mention the productivity and speed, without modern search engines like Google).