On Wed, Oct 04, 2017 at 07:23:51PM -0500, David Wright wrote: > Well, thank you. But this doesn't explain the paragraph above my comment. > I'm just trying to understand the suggestions being made by more > experienced folk here, like Reco and Greg.
My rationale is that having access to the Internet allows you to look up the answers to your problems, allows you to install missing software, etc. Being able to ping barney from fred on your LAN is pretty unimportant for most problem resolutions, compared to being able to ask Google "how do I set up NAT on Debian stretch", or whatever issue you're currently trying to solve. As far as /etc/hosts vs. setting up an internal DNS server, most home LANs are probably small enough that I would simply use /etc/hosts. Things may change if you live in a mansion with a staff, or you're the landlord for an apartment building, or something. My cut-off point would probably be a dozen machines. If there are more than a dozen machines, then I would consider setting up an internal DNS server for them.