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Disabling mDNS?

kadomony
Community Member

Hi All,

I'm helping a user troubleshoot an issue with software licensing on a Windows 10 that seems to be breaking. The licensing system of this software apparently is checking the network name of his connected laptop and his Google Nest Wifi Pro router is using mDNS to append ".lan" to the end of his machine's name on the network. This breaks his software license as it is checking the network name for differences.

Is there any way around this? Can he disable mDNS? How? Should he? Is there any consequence to the rest of his network/connected devices for disabling it?

2 REPLIES 2

MichaelP
Diamond Product Expert
Diamond Product Expert

Hello @kadomony 

mDNS uses ".local", not ".lan" to resolve local hostnames without a DNS server. It sends DNS requests as multicast packets, and each host responds with an answer if they are the host in question. Nest WiFi Pro has nothing to do with this at all.

What Google/Nest WiFi does do is run a DNS server in the primary Nest WiFi Pro unit, which is also the unit handling DHCP address assignments. Those two components are integrated together to support resolution of local host names that were assigned via DHCP in the ".lan" domain.

So, you can't disable mDNS, but that's actually not the issue here. It's more likely related to DHCP and the local DNS resolver. You also can't disable the local DNS resolver. However, you may be able to override some of the dynamically-assigned configuration that user's machine is getting via DHCP.  I'm not a Windows user, but you may be able to set a static DNS server address instead of using the local one. I don't know whether you can override the addition of the ".lan" though. Worst case, just create an IP address reservation for that host in the Google Home app, then configure the machine to statically configure everything instead of using DHCP at all.

Thank you!
We're using an always on VPN on this machine and the user works from home and office so I'm not sure if we can set static values. I will check with the team.