[GTALUG] Automatic .local and .lan hostnames

[Giles Orr]

I have a Raspberry Pi on my local network that acts as an MPD server.
It's hostname is "pib".  I have, for about a year and a half, been
referencing it from other machines on the local network as
"pib.local".  Yesterday, one of the machines stopped being able to
find "pib.local" but can now connect to "pib.lan" - which I don't
think used to work.  I've never set up my local machines to provide
<hostname>.local or <hostname>.lan addresses, it seems to be an
automatic service of both Fedora and Debian (or Raspbian).  And I've
always had problems with its indecisiveness about "is it .lan, or is
it .local?"  For some machines it's one, for some machines it's the
other.  But I think this is the first time it's switched.  And no, I
didn't make any configuration changes (or software upgrades) on the
machine that switched.

So now I'm really interested in how these names are made available.  I
don't care which of the two names it provides, but I'd really, really
like it to do it consistently.  Can someone point me in the right
direction, and I'll go do my homework.  Thanks.

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com