Some wise fella decided that Linux users don’t want to open sites that use the .local TLD. Too bad, because a lot of intranets use that, mostly because it happens to be a Microsoft recommendation and a lot of enterprises use Microsoft services.

The symtoms are simple: you can resolve the IP address of your .local server, but you just can’t access it (with PING or via a web browser). The reason for this is a daemon named Avahi which occupies this TLD.

The solution is simple, too. Open /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf, locate the [server] section, uncomment the domain-name line, and set it to .alocal, i.e.

domain-name=.alocal

Now restart the Avahi daemon:

/etc/init.d/avahi restart

Now maybe even restart your browser and purge cache, and then everything should be working fine. Thank you, Avahi, for yet another completely unnecessary intentional breakage.