Appliance deployment is unable to resolve .local domain names

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

• Live recovery 9.x deployment is unable to resolve FQDN's ending in a .local domain
• vCenter connection is unable to be established during live recovery configuration with error:
  

  Unable to connect to host "<vCenter_FQDN>"

• Manual resolution using NSLOOKUP returns a REFUSED error such as below:
  NOTE: In the example below the domain is test.local
  

  root@photon-xxxxxxxxxxx  [ / ]# nslookup <HOSTNAME>.test.local
  Server:         127.0.0.53
  Address:        127.0.0.53#53
  
  ** server can't find <HOSTNAME>.test.local: REFUSED

Environment

9.x

Cause

This is a known issue with the Photon OS, further information is available here: .local domain names not resolving on photon

Resolution

1. Initiate an SSH session to the live recovery appliance utilizing "admin" account
   
   
2. Elevate to root utilizing the following:

   su root

3. Verify no domains are configured with the following command:

   nmctl show-domains

4. Add your .local domain utilizing the following command:
   NOTE: In the example below the domain we are adding is "test.local"

   domainsnmctl set-dns-domains dev eth0 domains test.local

5. Verify the domain is now configured with

   nmctl show-domains

6. Test DNS resolution using nslookup, this should now resolve without the REFUSED error

Additional Information

The domain name .local is a special-use domain name reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) so that it may not be installed as a top-level domain in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. As such, it is similar to the other special domain names, such as localhost. However, local has since been designated for use in link-local networking by RFC 6762 in applications of multicast DNS (mDNS) and zero-configuration networking (zeroconf) so that DNS service may be established without local installations of the convention. See for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local