So far, I have avahi-daemon running on all my Ubuntu machines, partly because it is installed by default. The router I used to have was quite dumb and did not really do anything except DHCP and DHCPv6. I could access the other Linux computers with hostname.local which worked fine for my purposes.
Now I have an AVM FRITZ!Box 7360 which also does some more regarding hostnames as I can access the Linux machines with hostname.fritz.box in my local network as well.
For some reason, I also can do the following now (Linux → Windows):
$ ping martin-pavilion.local
PING martin-pavilion.local (192.168.188.28) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from Martin-Pavilion.fritz.box (192.168.188.28): icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=0.633 ms
The martin-pavilion is running Windows 8. I do not think that it was accessible via .local previously, and the FRITZ!Box seems to translate the .local into the .fritz.box.
What is happening here? I somewhat got that Zeroconf/Avahi/Bonjour managed to let every computer know about every other one. Does the FRITZ!Box do the same or is this different?
My /etc/resolv.conf is:
# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN
nameserver 127.0.1.1
search fritz.box
Best Answer
The FritzBox home router is using DHCP requests to update the FritzBox's DNS forwarding. Specifically: if there is a hostname option provided in the DHCP request then a hostname.fritz.box DNS record is provided by the FritzBox's DNS forwarding.
This is distinct from mDNS's .local domain. The FritzBox is not a mDNS proxy server.